"You see what it looks like," broke in Francis, turning to his wife furiously. "Never ask me to believe you again. I don't trust you—I never will trust you. Nobody will, if you keep on as you've begun. Go back with him, then—you're not my slave, much as you may pretend it."
"I won't!" said Marjorie spiritedly. "I've had enough of this. I'll stay here, if it takes ten years, till you admit that you've treated me horribly, and misjudged me. I've played fair. I've no way of proving it, against you two men, but I have! I'll prove it by any test you like."
"There's only one way you can convince me that one word you've said since you came up here was the truth," he told her, suddenly quiet and cold. "If you stay, of your own free will, out there in the clearing; if you take over the work that Pierre fell down on this evening, and stay there looking after me and my men—I'll believe you. There's no fun to doing that, just work; it stands to reason that you wouldn't do that for any reason unless to clear yourself. If you don't want to do that, you may go home with this gentleman; indeed, I won't let you do anything else. Take your choice."
Marjorie looked at him for a moment as if she wanted to do something violent to him. Then she spoke.
CHAPTER VII
"I see what you mean," she said. "I wasn't sporting in the first place—I wouldn't live up to my bargain. That's made you more apt to believe that I've been acting the same way ever since. You don't think I can see _any_thing through. Well—not particularly for your sake—more for my own, I guess—I'm going to see this through, if I die doing it. I'll stay—and take Pierre's place, Francis."
Francis's severe young face did not change at all.
"Very well," he said.
"But you understand," she went on, "that I'm not doing this to win anything but my own self-respect. And at the end of the three months, of course, I shall go back to New York. And you'll let me go, and see that I get free."
"I wouldn't do anything else for the world," said Francis in the same unmoved voice.