Boone's chest heaved with a spasm of agitation that made his breath a struggle. Until tonight he had not seen her since they had separated in Colonel Wallifarro's library in Louisville. The world had been desolate. Now she seemed to fill it with Tantalus allurement, and they stood in a battle of wills with a dead man lying between them—and the dead man had been murdered for him.
"Why do you care," he demanded, with a fierce outburst of hungry emotion, "what I do? What are the lives of these human snakes to you?"
Anne's chin came up a little.
"Nothing," she declared crisply. "Perhaps death is too good for them; but murder's not good enough for you!"
He leaned forward toward her with an avid eagerness in his eyes, and abruptly his voice shook as he stubbornly repeated his question:
"I was asking you why—so far as I'm concerned—you care?"
The curt interrogation, with the throb of the restraint in the voice that put it, brought to Anne that same feeling of exaltation that had come when he had seized her so vehemently in his arms in the bluegrass garden on a June morning. Even now she could sway him if only she let a touch of the responsiveness that clamoured in her find expression, but she had come in answer to a more austere summons. Between them as lovers who had irreparably quarrelled matters stood unchanged, and she was not here to fight emotion with emotion. She had come to draw him back, if she could, from the edge of disaster. Incidentally—for to her just then it seemed quite incidental—she was engaged to marry Morgan Wallifarro.
"I care," she said, rather weakly and conscious of the ring of platitude in her words, "because of the past—because we are—old friends."
Boone's face darkened again into clouded disappointment; then he looked down, jerking his head toward the cot, and demanded shortly:
"All right. I was a fool, of course, but how about him?"