In this moment Alan did not think of John Graham.

It seemed to him that she was like a child again, the child who had come to him in his cabin, and who had stood with her back against his cabin door, entreating him to achieve the impossible; an angel, almost, with her smooth, shining hair, her clear, beautiful eyes, her white throat which waited with its little heart-throb for him to beat down the fragile defense which now lay in the greater power of his own hands.

The inequality of it, and the pitilessness of what had been in his mind to say and do, together with an inundating sense of his own brute mastery, swept over him, and in sudden desperation he reached out his hands toward her and cried: "Mary Standish, in God's name tell me the truth.

Tell me why you have come up here!" "I have come," she said, looking at him steadily, "because I know that a man like you, when he loves a woman, will fight for her and protect her even though he may not possess her." "But you didn't know that--not until--the cottonwoods!" he protested.
"Yes, I did.

I knew it in Ellen McCormick's cabin." She rose slowly before him, and he, too, rose to his feet, staring at her like a man who had been struck, while intelligence--a dawning reason--an understanding of the strange mystery of her that morning, sent the still greater thrill of its shock through him.