“If time and events prove so unkind to me that I never come to a vindication in this country,” he said, “just go on thinking of me as a thief and a wild rider, and a man of the night. Good-bye, Miss Landcraft.”
She closed the door, and stood cooling from her sudden resentment at seeing him there alive when her heart had told her that he must be lying dead in the dust of the river trail. She should not have been so suddenly resentful, she now believed. Perhaps there were mitigating circumstances which he would not stoop to explain unasked. Her heart bounded with the thought; warm blood came spreading in her cheeks.
But Alan Macdonald was gone; misjudged and unjustly condemned, she now believed, remorse assailing her. Now the fault could not be repaired, for he was not the man to come back. But there was much in knowing that she had not been mistaken in the beginning; comfort and pride in the full knowledge that he was a man! Only a man would have come, bravely and sincerely, in that manner to her father; only a man would have put his hurt behind him like that and marched away from her, too proud to stoop to the mean expedient of begging her to allow him to explain.
She sighed as she turned back into the room where the colonel sat at his desk, but her cheek was hot, her bosom agitated by an uplifting of pride. The colonel turned, with inquiring impatience, a letter in his hand.
“He is gone,” she said.
“Very well,” he nodded, shortly.
“I have just come back to tell you, father, that I have broken my engagement with Major King, to—”
“Impossible! nonsense!”
“To save you embarrassment in your future relations with him,” she concluded, unshaken.