He moistened his parched lips with the tip of his tongue. “There is no use getting excited, Ruth. I came here because I love you. If you’d only be reasonable. Listen. I’m going to California. If you change your mind and want to come out there——”
Ruth marched past him and flung the door open. She turned on him eyes that blazed. “If you’re not gone in five seconds, I’ll turn the men loose on you. They’ve been aching for a chance.”
His vanity withered before her wrath. For the moment he saw himself as she saw him, a snake in the grass, hateful to all decent human beings. It was a moral certainty that she would keep her word and call the Circle Diamond riders. What they would do to him he could guess.
He went without another word.
Presently she heard him galloping down the road and out of her life.
The anger died out of Ruth almost instantly. She was filled with a sense of desolating degradation. There had been a time in her life when she had put this weakling before Rowan, when her laughter and her friendliness had been for him instead of for the man to whom she was married. He had never of course been anything vital to her life, never one hundredth part as important to her as Rowan. Indeed, she had used him as an instrument with which to punish her husband. But the fact remained that she had offered him her friendship, had in resentment flirted with him and skirted the edge of sex emotion.
The feeling that flooded her now was almost a physical nausea.