She scarcely knew what she did. She remembered only the terrible empty room. The owl uncannily turning its head here and there and staring at her with its eyes, yellow in the firelight.
She dropped on the floor by him and clung again to his knees, her head in his lap in pity for him.
“That is the story of the dying lion,” he said after a while. “The lion who worked all his cunning and skill and courage to get the beautiful doe in his power, only to find he was dying—dying and could not eat. Could you love a dying lion, child?” he asked abruptly—“tell me truly, for as you speak so will I act—would make you queen of all the desert.”
She raised her eyes to his. They were wet with tears. He had touched the pity in them. She saw him as she had never seen him before. All her fear of him vanished, and she was held by the cords of a strange fascination. She knew not what she did. The owl looked at her queerly, and she almost sobbed it out, hysterically:
“Oh, I could—love—you—you—who are so strong and who suffer—suffer so”—
“You could love me?” he asked. “Then, then I would marry you to-night—now—if—if—that uncovering—that touch—had not been put upon me to do nobler things than to gratify my own passion, had not shown me the other half which all these years has been dead—my double.” He was silent.
“And so I sent to-day,” he began after a while, “for a friend of yours, one with whom you can be happier than—the dying lion. He has been out of the county—sent out—it was part of the plan, part of the snare of the lion and his whelp. And so I sent for him this morning, feeling the death blow, you know. I sent him an urgent message, to meet you here at nine.” He glanced at his watch. “It is past that now, but he had far to ride. He will come, I hope—ah, listen!”
They heard the steps of a rider coming up the gravel walk.
“It is he,” said Travis calmly—“Clay.”
She sprang up quickly, half defiantly. The old Conway spirit flashed in her eyes and she came to him tall and splendid and with half a look of protest, half command, and yet in it begging, pleading, yearning for—she knew not what.