a man for whom to spare herself nothing—no longer a character to admire, a nobility to worship, but a sweetheart to live for, to die for! Her blood smoked in her veins—but her mind was cool.
"I've been a fool," Harrington confessed weakly, as feeling that some speech were necessary.
"No! No!" the girl urged quickly, tactfully. "You have been a man of large faith."
"I have been blind," he reproached himself.
"No, no," she objected again. "You have merely been looking at some things so intently that you did not see certain other things."
Harrington blinked and stared wonderingly. He took account of the difference in two women. Before him was this little slip of a girl, teacher of an Indian school, who was herself a racial hybrid, but in friendship and loyalty a thoroughbred. Up yonder on the hill was a different type of woman; pure in blood, softly nurtured and richly circumstanced—his kind of woman! And she loved him; but . . . feebly, futilely.
Harrington was speaking no word, yet Lahleet felt the crisis in their relations and her hand was small enough to creep through the bars; she too was wordless. There were noises about them, of course; low buzzes of conversation, an occasional oath, the clang of steel doors, the voice of a trusty paging a prisoner in the huge cage below; yet these were mere externals. Harrington's consciousness had relapsed into some vast cosmic silence. All was still within him as in the soundless spaces of the universe. An entire eon of time—of thinking, comparing, contrasting—seemed to elapse before he became conscious of some stir in the corridor, something happening. He knew what in-
