He could not see the deep flush upon her cheeks, but he was not deaf to the pitiful falter in her voice.
"Because he has been good and true to me," she explained, frankly, "better than anybody else in all the world. I don't care what you say, you and those others who do not know him, but I believe in him; I think he is a man. They won't let me see him, the Herndons, nor permit him to come to the house. He has not been in Glencaid for two years, until yesterday. The Indian rising has driven all the miners out from the Black Range, and he came down here for no other purpose than to get a glimpse of me, and learn how I was getting on. I—I saw him over at the hotel just for a moment—Mrs. Guffy handed me a note—and I—I had only just left him when I encountered you at the door. I wanted to see him again, to talk with him longer, but I couldn't manage to get away from you, and I didn't know what to do. There, I've told it all; do you really think I am so very bad, because—because I like Bob Hampton?"
He stood a moment completely nonplussed, yet compelled to answer.
"I certainly have no right to question your motives," he said, at last, "and I believe your purposes to be above reproach. I wish I might give the same credit to this man Hampton. But, Miss Naida, the world does not often consent to judge us by our own estimation of right and wrong; it prefers to place its own interpretation on acts, and thus often condemns the innocent. Others might not see this as I do, nor have such unquestioning faith in you."
"I know," she admitted, stubbornly, "but I wanted to see him; I have been so lonely for him, and this was the only possible way."
Brant felt a wave of uncontrollable sympathy sweep across him, even while he was beginning to hate this man, who, he felt, had stolen a passage into the innocent heart of a girl not half his age, one knowing little of the ways of the world. He saw again that bare desert, with those two half-dead figures clasped in each other's arms, and felt that he understood the whole miserable story of a girl's trust, a man's perfidy.
"May I walk beside you until you meet him?" he asked.
"You will not quarrel?"
"No; at least not through any fault of mine."
A few steps in the moonlight and she again took his arm, although they scarcely spoke. At the bridge she withdrew her hand and uttered a peculiar call, and Hampton stepped forth from the concealing bushes, his head bare, his hat in his hand.