Shefford lived the hour as a dream and went back to the quiet darkness under the cedars to lie wide-eyed, trying to recall all that she had said.  For she had talked as if utterance had long been dammed behind a barrier of silence.

There followed other hours like that one, indescribable hours, so sweet they stung, and in which, keeping pace with his love, was the nobler stride of a spirit that more every day lightened her burden.

The thing he had to do, sooner or later, was to tell her he knew she was Fay Larkin, not dead, but alive, and that, not love nor religion, but sacrifice, nailed her down to her martyrdom.  Many and many a time he had tried to force himself to tell her, only to fail.  He hated to risk ending this sweet, strange, thoughtless, girlish mood of hers.  It might not be soon won back—­perhaps never.  How could he tell what chains bound her?  And so as he vacillated between Joe’s cautious advice to go slow and his own pity the days and weeks slipped by.

One haunting fear kept him sleepless half the nights and sick even in his dreams, and it was that the Mormon whose sealed wife she was might come, surely would come, some night.  Shefford could bear it.  But what would that visit do to Fay Larkin?  Shefford instinctively feared the awakening in the girl of womanhood, of deeper insight, of a spiritual realization of what she was, of a physical dawn.

He might have spared himself needless torture.  One day Joe Lake eyed him with penetrating glance.

“Reckon you don’t have to sleep right on that Stonebridge trail,” said the Mormon, significantly.

Shefford felt the blood burn his neck and face.  He had pulled his tarpaulin closer to the trail, and his motive was as an open page to the keen Mormon.

“Why?” asked Shefford.

“There won’t be any Mormons riding in here soon—­by night—­to visit the women,” replied Joe, bluntly.  “Haven’t you figured there might be government spies watching the trails?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Well, take a hunch, then,” added the Mormon, gruffly, and Shefford divined, as well as if he had been told, that warning word had gone to Stonebridge.  Gone despite the fact that Nas Ta Bega had reported every trail free of watchers!  There was no sign of any spies, cowboys, outlaws, or Indians in the vicinity of the valley.  A passionate gratitude to the Mormon overcame Shefford; and the unreasonableness of it, the nature of it, perturbed him greatly.  But, something hammered into his brain, if he loved one of these sealed wives, how could he help being jealous?

The result of Joe’s hint was that Shefford put off the hour of revelation, lived in his dream, helped the girl grow farther and farther away from her trouble, until that inevitable hour arrived when he was driven by accumulated emotion as much as the exigency of the case.

He had not often walked with her beyond the dark shade of the pinyons round the cottage, but this night, when he knew he must tell her, he led her away down the path, through the cedar grove to the west end of the valley where it was wild and lonely and sad and silent.