"To save you from yourself!" retorted the girl in a low, exasperated voice. "He did not say what threatened you; he is a good friend for a man to have. But we soon found out what you were—a man well born, well bred, full of brilliant possibility, who was slowly becoming an idle, cynical, self-centered egoist—a man who, lacking the lash of need or the spur of ambition, was degenerating through the sheer uselessness and inanity of his life. And, oh, the pity of it! For Mr. Keen and I have taken a—a curiously personal interest in you—in your case. I say, the pity of it!"
Astounded, dumb under her stinging words, he rode beside her through the brilliant sunshine, wheeled mechanically as she turned her horse, and rode north again.
"And now—now!" she said passionately, "you turn on the woman you loved! Oh, you are not worth it!"
"You are quite right," he said, turning very white under her scorn. "Almost all you have said is true enough, I fancy. I amount to nothing; I am idle, cynical, selfish. The emptiness of such a life requires a stimulant; even a fool abhors a vacuum. So I drink—not so very much yet—but more than I realize. And it is close enough to a habit to worry me. . . . Yes, almost all you say is true; Kerns knows it; I know it—now that you have told me. You see, he couldn't tell me, because I should not have believed him. But I believe you—all you say, except one thing. And that is only a glimmer of decency left in me—not that I make any merit of it. No, it is merely instinctive. For I have not turned on the woman I loved."
Her face was pale as her level eyes met him:
"You said she was nothing to you. . . . Look there! Do you see her? Do you see?"
Her voice broke nervously as he swung around to stare at a rider bearing down at a gallop—a woman on a big roan, tearing along through the spring sunshine, passing them with wind-flushed cheeks and dark, incurious eyes, while her powerful horse carried her on, away through the quivering light and shadow of the woodland vista.
"Is that the person?"
"Y-es," she faltered. "Was I wrong?"
"Quite wrong, Miss Southerland."