"Oh, no."

Donnegan settled his hat a little more firmly upon his head. He had been
on the verge of attributing her gentleness to a blank, stupid mind; he
began to realize that there was metal under the surface. He felt that
some of the qualities of the father were echoed faintly, and at a
distance, in the child. In a way, she made him think of an unawakened
creature. When she was roused, if the time ever came, it might be that
her eye could become a thing alternately of fire and ice, and her voice
might carry with a ring.

"This business has to be gotten through quickly," he went on. "One
meeting with Jack Landis will be enough."

She wondered why he set his jaw when he said this, but he was wondering
how deeply the colonel's ward had fallen into the clutches of Nelly
Lebrun. If that first meeting did not bring Landis to his senses, what
followed? One of two things. Either the girl must stay on in The Corner
and try her hand with her fiancé again, or else the final brutal
suggestion of the colonel must be followed; he must kill Landis. It was
a cold-blooded suggestion, but Donnegan was a cold-blooded man. As he
looked at the girl, where she sat on the boulder, he knew definitely,
first and last, that he loved her, and that he would never again love
any other woman. Every instinct drew him toward the necessity of
destroying Landis. There was his stumbling block. But what if she truly
loved Landis?

He would have to wait in order to find that out. And as he stood there
with the sun shining on the red stubble on his face he made a resolution
the more profound because it was formed in silence: if she truly loved