"I'd hoped that out here, at the mine, he'd be different, that he'd behave, that people would come to respect and like him. I'd hoped for that right up to the time I saw you coming across the street with him. I felt it must be he. I hadn't heard from him in months, not a line. That's why I came out here. And I guess that in my heart I'd expected to find him like that. The uncertainty, that was the worst....
"Peculiar, isn't it, why I should have been uncertain? I should have admitted what I felt intuitively, but I always have hoped, I always will hope that he'll come through it sometime. That hope has kept me from telling myself that it must be the same with him out here as it was back there; that's why I fooled myself until I saw you ... with him.
"And I'm so glad it happened to be you who picked him up. You understand, you—"
Emotion choked off her words.
Bayard walked from her, returned to the bedside and stared down at the inert figure there. He was in a tumult. The contrast between this man and wife was too dreadful to be comprehended in calm. Lytton was the lowest human being he had ever known, degenerated to an organism that lived solely to satiate its most unworthy appetites. Ann, the woman crying yonder, was quite the most beautiful creature on whom he had ever looked and, though he had seen her for the first time no more than an hour before, her charm had touched every masculine instinct, had gripped him with that urge which draws the sexes one to another ... yet, he was not conscious of it. She was, in his eyes, so wonderful, so removed from his world, that he could not presume to recognize her attraction as for himself. She was a distant, unattainable creature, one to serve, to admire; perhaps, sometime, to worship reverently and that was the fact which set the blood congesting in his head when he looked down at the waster for whom she had traveled across a continent that she might suffer like this. Lytton was attainable, was comprehensible, and Bayard was urged to make him suffer in atonement for the wretchedness he had brought to this woman who loved him.... Who.... loved him?
The man turned to look at Ann again, his lower lip caught speculatively between his thumb and forefinger.
"Now, I suppose the thing to do is to plan, to make some sort of arrangements ... now that I have found him," she said in a strained voice, bracing her shoulders, lifting a hand to brush a lock of hair back from her white, blue-veined temple.
She smiled courageously at the cowboy who approached her diffidently.
"I came out here to find out what was going on, to help him if he were succeeding, to ... help him if ... as I have found him."
Her directness had returned and, as she spoke, she looked Bayard in the eye, steadily.