She was determined to preserve before him the outer coldness of her nature to the last.
“Let us reckon together,” she said. “I helped to—in fact, I saved your life at Apia. You helped to save my life at the Devil’s Slide. That is balanced. You did me—the honour to say that you loved me once. Well, one of my race loved you. That is balanced also. My sister’s death came through you. There is no balance to that. What shall balance Alo’s death? ... I leave you to think that over. It is worth thinking about. I shall keep your secret, too. Kilby does not know you. I doubt that he ever saw you, though, as I said, he followed you with the natives that night in Apia. He was to come to see me to-day. I think I intended to tell him all, and shift—the duty—of punishment on his shoulders, which I do not doubt he would fulfil. But he shall not know. Do not ask why. I have changed my mind, that is all. But still the account remains a long one. You will have your lifetime to reckon with it, free from any interference on my part; for, if I can help it, we shall never meet again in this world—never.... And now, good-bye.”
Without a gesture of farewell she turned and left him standing there, in misery and bitterness, but in a thankfulness too, more for Ruth’s sake than his own. He raised his arms with a despairing motion, then let them drop heavily to his side....
And then two strong hands caught his throat, a body pressed hard against him, and he was borne backward—backward—to the cliff!
CHAPTER XX. AFTER THE STORM
I was sitting on the verandah, writing a letter to Belle Treherne. The substantial peace of a mountain evening was on me. The air was clear, and full of the scent of the pines and cedars, and the rumble of the rapids came musically down the canon. I lifted my head and saw an eagle sailing away to the snow-topped peak of Trinity, and then turned to watch the orioles in the trees. The hour was delightful. It made me feel how grave mere living is, how noble even the meanest of us becomes sometimes—in those big moments when we think the world was built for us. It is half egotism, half divinity; but why quarrel with it?
I was young, ambitious; and Love and I were at that moment the only figures in the universe really deserving attention! I looked on down a lane of cedars before me, seeing in imagination a long procession of pleasant things; of—As I looked, another procession moved through the creatures of my dreams, so that they shrank away timidly, then utterly, and this new procession came on and on, until—I suddenly rose, and started forward fearfully, to see—unhappy reality!—the body of Galt Roscoe carried towards me.
Then a cold wind seemed to blow from the glacier above and killed all the summer. A man whispered to me: “We found him at the bottom of the ravine yonder. He’d fallen over, I suppose.”
I felt his heart. “He is not dead, thank God!” I said.