Gathering her in his arms, he rose and drew her to her feet. Pressed
against him, shaken by the beating of the heart that leaped at his touch,
she again breathed the eternal question, "Do you love me"--words that
come from under-layers of doubt in the despairingly impassioned.

He reassured her as the unloving man does, lying to get away, soothing
with kisses, eager to break loose from arms that are unwelcome and yet
tempt. He played his part like a true lover and at the door was genuinely
stirred when he saw there were tears in her eyes. He had not guessed she
could be so tender, that her hard exterior hid such depths of sweetness.
His parting embrace might have deceived a more love-learned woman, and he
left her with a slight, unwonted sense of shame in his heart.

Away from her, where he could think, he pushed the shame aside as he was
ready to push her. The fire she had kindled in him died; the woman he
had clasped and kissed ceased to figure as a being to desire and became
an enigma to solve.

The fate of the bandits had touched no vulnerable spot in her. She had
been unmoved by it. Even did she adore Mayer so ardently and completely
that his presence was an anodyne for every other thought, she would have
shown, she _must_ have shown, some disturbance. He had known women who
lived so utterly in the moment that the past lost its reality, was as
dissevered from the present as though it had never existed. Was she one
of these? Could her relation--whatever it was--with either of the outlaws
have been so erased from her consciousness that she could talk of his
danger with a face as unconcerned as the one she had presented to Mayer's
vigilant eye?

It was impossible. There would have been a betrayal, a quiver of memory,