him. It haunted him. If he could not win kisses like that from
Joan's lips, of her own free will, then he wanted none. No other
woman's lips would ever touch his. And he begged Joan in the
terrible earnestness of a stern and hungering outcast for her love.
And Joan could only sadly shake her head and tell him she was sorry
for him, that the more she really believed he loved her the surer
she was that he would give her up. Then always he passionately
refused. He must have her to keep, to look at as his treasure, to
dream over, and hope against hope that she would love him some day.
Women sometimes learned to love their captors, he said; and if she
only learned, then he would take her away to Australia, to distant
lands. But most of all he begged her to show him again what it meant
to be loved by a good woman. And Joan, who knew that her power now
lay in her unattainableness, feigned a wavering reluctance, when in
truth any surrender was impossible. He left her with a spirit that
her presence gave him, in a kind of trance, radiant, yet with
mocking smile, as if he foresaw the overthrow of his soul through
her, and in the light of that his waning power over his Legion was
as nothing.

In the afternoon he went down into camp to strengthen the
associations he had made, to buy claims, and to gamble. Upon his
return Joan, peeping through a crack between the boards, could
always tell whether he had been gambling, whether he had won or
lost.

Most of the evenings he remained in his cabin, which after dark
became a place of mysterious and stealthy action. The members of his
Legion visited him, sometimes alone, never more than two together.
Joan could hear them slipping in at the hidden aperture in the back