“You can tell them,” she went on with a sad little laugh, “that it was all a mistake—my going, my being Miss Chetwynde.”
“Kind of changed your birth?” he said.
She laughed with her eyes closed.
“Yes; and that I find I’m only their Esmeralda, after all. Tell them to ask no questions, but to go on as if I had never been away.”
“You shall go down to the saloon to-morrow,” he said, quietly.
“No, to-night!” she exclaimed, rising with a sudden light in her eyes. “I want it all over at once. I want to go back to the old life this minute. I’m longing to see them all, to look upon the faces that don’t smile and smile at you while they stab you in the back, to see, once more, honest men, with too much grit in them to buy and sell women, to deceive a girl because she is a girl and is ignorant of the ways of the world! Take me to them now, at once, Varley!”
“You shall go,” he said, very quietly.
She caught up her hat and put it on with trembling fingers and in eager haste.
He placed her on the horse, and they rode down to the camp as they had ridden to the hut; and once again, as they rode through the cool air and amidst the familiar surroundings, the past life in England seemed but a dream. Only, in the innermost recesses of her heart there lay, like a tiny snake, a stinging pain of wistful longing for the man she had cast off forever. She tried to ignore it, to think only of her joy in getting back to Varley and Three Star; but the love which is at once woman’s greatest blessing and greatest curse, was there still, and would not be crushed out. Trafford’s face rose before her in the close darkness, his voice—ay, every tone of it—mingled with the rhythmical beat of the horses’ hoofs.