"No; I didn't mean to tell any one. But to think of his coming out here to nurse me, leaving Verda on the very night he married her! A brother of my own blood wouldn't have done it."

The young woman was looking up with a shrewd little smile. "Maybe the blood brother would do even that, if you had just made it possible for him to marry the girl he'd set his heart on, John."

"Piffle!" growled the man. And then: "Hasn't the time come when you can tell me a little more about what happened to me after the doctor put me to sleep that night at the dam?"

"Yes. The only reason you haven't been told was because we didn't want you to worry; we wanted you to have a chance to get well and strong again."

The man's eyes filled suddenly, and he took no shame. He was still shaky enough in nerve and muscle to excuse it. "Nobody ever had such friends, Corona," he said. "You all knew I'd have to go back to Lawrenceville and fight it out, and you didn't want me to go handicapped and half-dead. But how did they come to let you take me away? I've known Macauley ever since I was in knickers. He is not the man to take any chances."

The young woman's laugh was soundless. "Mr. Macauley wasn't asked. He thinks you are dead," she said.

"What!"

"It's so. You were not the only one wounded in the fight at the dam. There were two others – two of M'Graw's men. Three days later, just as Colonel-daddy and Billy Starbuck were getting ready to steal you away, one of the others died. In some way the report got out that you were the one who died, and that made everything quite easy. The report has never been contradicted, and when Mr. Macauley reached Brewster the police people told him that he was too late."

"Good heavens! Does everybody in Brewster think I'm dead?"

"Nearly everybody. But you needn't look so horrified. You're not dead, you know; and there were no obituaries in the newspapers, or anything like that."

The man got upon his feet rather unsteadily.

"That's the limit," he said definitively. "I'm a man now, Corona; too much of a man, I hope, to hide behind another man's grave. I'm going back to Brewster, to-day!"

The young woman made a quaint little grimace at him. "How are you going to get there?" she asked. "It's twenty miles, and the walking is awfully bad – in spots."

"But I must go. Can't you see what everybody will say of me? – that I was too cowardly to face the music when my time came? Nobody will believe that I wasn't a consenting party to this hide-away!"

"Sit down," she commanded calmly; and when he obeyed: "From day to day, since I began coming out here, John, I've been trying to rediscover the man whom I met just once, one evening over a year ago, at Cousin Adda's house in Guthrieville: I can't find him – he's gone."

"Corona!" he said. "Then you recognized me?"

"Not at first. But after a while little things began to come back; and what you told me – about Miss Richlander, you know, and the hint you gave me of your trouble – did the rest."

"Then you knew – or you thought – I was a criminal?"

She nodded, and her gaze was resting upon the near-by gravel heaps. "Cousin Adda wrote me. But that made no difference. I didn't know whether you had done the things they said you had, or not. What I did know was that you had broken your shackles in some way and were trying to get free. You were, weren't you?"

"I suppose so; in some blind fashion. But it is you who have set me free, Corona. It began that night in Guthrieville when I stole one of your gloves; it wasn't anything you said; it was what you so evidently believed and lived. And out here: I was simply a raw savage when you first saw me. I had tumbled headlong into the abyss of the new and the elemental, and if I am trying to scramble out now on the side of honor and clean manhood, it is chiefly because you have shown me the way."

"When did I ever, John?" – with an up-glance of the gray eyes that was almost wistful.

"Always; and with a wisdom that makes me almost afraid of you. For example, there was the night when I was fairly on the edge of letting Jibbey stay in the mine and go mad if he wanted to: you lashed me with the one word that made me save his life instead of taking it. How did you know that was the one word to say?"

"How do we know anything?" she inquired softly. "The moment brings its own inspiration. It broke my heart to see what you could be, and to think that you might not be it, after all. But I came out here this morning to talk about something else. What are you going to do when you are able to leave Sunrise Gulch?"

"The one straightforward thing there is for me to do. I shall go back to Lawrenceville and take my medicine."

"And after that?"

"That is for you to say, Corona. Would you marry a convict?"

"You are not guilty."

"That is neither here nor there. They will probably send me to prison, just the same, and the stigma will be mine to wear for the remainder of my life. I can wear it now, thank God! But to pass it on to you – and to your children, Corona … if I could get my own consent to that, you couldn't get yours."

"Yes, I could, John; I got it the first time Colonel-daddy brought me out here and let me see you. You were out of your head, and you thought you were talking to Billy Starbuck – in the automobile on the night when you were going with him to the fight at the dam. It made me go down on my two knees, John, and kiss your poor, hot hands."

He slipped his one good arm around her and drew her close.

"Now I can go back like a man and fight it through to the end," he exulted soberly. "Jibbey will take me; I know he is wearing himself out trying to make me believe that he can wait, and that Verda understands, though he won't admit it. And when it is all over, when they have done their worst to me – "

With a quick little twist she broke away from the encircling arm.

"John, dear," she said, and her voice was trembling between a laugh and a sob, "I'm the wickedest, wickedest woman that ever lived and breathed – and the happiest! I knew what you would do, but I couldn't resist the temptation to make you say it. Listen: this morning Colonel-daddy got a night-letter from Billy Starbuck. You have been wondering why Billy never came out here to see you – it was because he and Mr. Stillings have been in Lawrenceville, trying to clear you. They are there now, and the wire says that Watrous Dunham has been arrested and that he has broken down and confessed. You are a free man, John; you – "

The grass-cropping pony had widened its circle by a full yard, and the westward-pointing shadows of the firs were growing shorter and more clearly defined as the August sun swung higher over the summits of the eastern Timanyonis. For the two on the house bench, time, having all its interspaces filled with beatific silences, had no measure that was worth recording. In one of the more coherent intervals it was the man who said:

"Some things in this world are very wonderful, Corona. We call them happenings, and try to account for them as we may by the laws of chance. Was it chance that threw us together at your cousin's house in Guthrieville a year ago last June?"

She laughed happily. "I suppose it was – though I'd like to be romantic enough to believe that it wasn't."

"Debritt would say that it was the Absolute Ego," he said, half musingly.

"And who is Mr. Debritt?"

"He is the man I dined with on my last evening in Lawrenceville. He had been joking me about my various little smugnesses – good job, good clothes, easy life, and all that, and he wound up by warning me to watch out for the Absolute Ego."

"What is the Absolute Ego?" she asked dutifully.

John Montague Smith, with his curling yellow beard three weeks untrimmed, with his clothes dressing the part of a neglected camper, and with a steel-jacketed bullet trying to encyst itself under his right shoulder-blade, grinned exultantly.

"Debritt didn't know, himself; but I know now: it's the primitive man-soul; the 'I' that is able to refuse to be bound down and tied by environment or habit or petty conventions, or any of the things we misname 'limitations.' It's asleep in most of us; it was asleep in me. You made it sit up and rub its eyes for a minute or two that evening in Guthrieville, but it dozed off again, and there had to be an earthquake at the last to shake it alive. Do you know the first thing it did when it took hold and began to drive?"

"No."

"Here is where the law of chances falls to pieces, Corona. Without telling me anything about it, this newly emancipated man-soul of mine made a bee-line for the only Absolute Ego woman it had ever known. And it found her."

Again the young woman laughed happily. "If you are going to call me names, Ego-man, you'll have to make it up to me some other way," she said.

Whereupon, the moment being strictly elemental and sacred to demonstrations of the absolute, he did.