“I hope I won’t shock you again by riding alone through the woods with a man,” she said with a light laugh.

Nevertheless, she was quite pale as he answered, somewhat coldly, that he had no right to be shocked at anything she might choose to do.

“But you were shocked, for you rode away the last time without speaking,” she said; “and yet”—­she looked up suddenly into his eyes with a smileless face—­“that man you saw me with once had a better right to ride alone with me than any other man.  He was”—­

“Your lover?” said Blair with brutal brevity.

“My husband!” returned Mrs. MacGlowrie slowly.

“Then you are not a widow,” gasped Blair.

“No.  I am only a divorced woman.  That is why I have had to live a lie here.  That man—­that hypocrite—­whose secret was only half exposed the other night, was my husband—­divorced from me by the law, when, an escaped convict, he fled with another woman from the State three years ago.”  Her face flushed and whitened again; she put up her hand blindly to her straying hair, and for an instant seemed to sway in the saddle.

But Blair as quickly leaped from his horse, and was beside her.  “Let me help you down,” he said quickly, “and rest yourself until you are better.”  Before she could reply, he lifted her tenderly to the ground and placed her on a mossy stump a little distance from the trail.  Her color and a faint smile returned to her troubled face.

“Had we not better go on?” she said, looking around.  “I never went so far as to sit down in the woods with him that day.”

“Forgive me,” he said pleadingly, “but, of course, I knew nothing.  I disliked the man from instinct—­I thought he had some power over you.”

“He has none—­except the secret that would also have exposed himself.”

“But others knew it.  Colonel Starbottle must have known his name?  And yet”—­as he remembered he stammered—­“he refused to tell me.”

“Yes, but not because he knew he was my husband, but because he knew he bore the same name.  He thinks, as every one does, that my husband died in San Francisco.  The man who died there was my husband’s cousin—­a desperate man and a noted duelist.”

“And you assumed to be his widow?” said the astounded Blair.

“Yes, but don’t blame me too much,” she said pathetically.  “It was a wild, a silly deceit, but it was partly forced upon me.  For when I first arrived across the plains, at the frontier, I was still bearing my husband’s name, and although I was alone and helpless, I found myself strangely welcomed and respected by those rude frontiersmen.  It was not long before I saw it was because I was presumed to be the widow of Allen MacGlowrie—­who had just died in San Francisco.  I let them think so, for I knew—­what they did not—­that Allen’s wife had separated from him and married again, and that my taking his name could do no harm.  I accepted their kindness; they gave me my first start in business, which brought me here.  It was not much of a deceit,” she continued, with a slight tremble of her pretty lip, “to prefer to pass as the widow of a dead desperado than to be known as the divorced wife of a living convict.  It has hurt no one, and it has saved me just now.”