“Ugh!” suddenly exclaimed Nas Ta Bega.

Joe Lake muttered low and deep, and this time there was no mistake about the nature of his speech.  Shefford did not have the courage to turn to see what had caused these exclamations.  He knew since today had dawned that there was calamity in the air.

“Shefford, I reckon if I know women there’s a little hell coming to you,” said the Mormon, significantly.

Shefford wheeled as if a powerful force had turned him on a pivot.  He saw Fay Larkin.  She seemed to be almost running.  She was unhooded and her bright hair streamed down.  Her swift, lithe action was without its usual grace.  She looked wild, and she almost fell crossing the stepping-stones of the brook.

Joe hurried to meet her, took hold of her arm and spoke, but she did not seem to hear him.  She drew him along with her, up the little bench under the cedars straight toward Shefford.  Her face held a white, mute agony, as if in the hour of strife it had hardened into marble.  But her eyes were dark-purple fire—­windows of an extraordinarily intense and vital life.  In one night the girl had become a woman.  But the blight Shefford had dreaded to see—­the withering of the exquisite soul and spirit and purity he had considered inevitable, just as inevitable as the death of something similar in the flower she resembled, when it was broken and defiled—­nothing of this was manifest in her.  Straight and swiftly she came to him back in the shade of the cedars and took hold of his hands.

“Last night—­he came!” she said.

“Yes—­Fay—­I—­I know,” replied Shefford, haltingly.

He was tremblingly conscious of amaze at her—­of something wonderful in her.  She did not heed Joe, who stepped aside a little; she did not see Nas Ta Bega, who sat motionless on a log, apparently oblivious to her presence.

“You knew he came?”

“Yes, Fay.  I was awake when—­they rode in.  I watched them.  I sat up all night.  I saw them ride away.”

“If you knew when he came why didn’t you run to me—­to get to me before he did?”

Her question was unanswerable.  It had the force of a blow.  It stunned him.  Its sharp, frank directness sprang from a simplicity and a strength that had not been nurtured in the life he had lived.  So far men had wandered from truth and nature!

“I came to you as soon as I was able,” she went on.  “I must have fainted.  I just had to drag myself around. . . .  And now I can tell you.”

He was powerless to reply, as if she had put another unanswerable question.  What did she mean to tell him?  What might she not tell him?  She loosed her hands from his and lifted them to his shoulders, and that was the first conscious action of feeling, of intimacy, which she had ever shown.  It quite robbed Shefford of strength, and in spite of his sorrow there was an indefinable thrill in her touch.  He looked at her, saw the white-and-gold beauty that was hers yesterday and seemed changed to-day, and he recognized Fay Larkin in a woman he did not know.