and gazed smilingly across the sunlit Bar. The two gaunt shadows of
her husband and lover, linked like twins, were slowly passing along the
river bank on their way to the eclipsing obscurity of the cottonwoods.
Below her--almost at her very feet--the unconscious Arthur Wayne was
pushing his work on the river bed, far out to the promontory. The
sunlight fell upon his vivid scarlet shirt, his bared throat, and head
clustering with perspiring curls. The same sunlight fell upon Mrs.
McGee's brown head too, and apparently put a wicked fancy inside it. She
ran to her bedroom, and returned with a mirror from its wall, and, after
some trials in getting the right angle, sent a searching reflection upon
the spot where Arthur was at work.

For an instant a diamond flash played around him. Then he lifted his
head and turned it curiously towards the crest above him. But the next
moment he clapped his hands over his dazzled but now smiling eyes, as
Mrs. McGee, secure in her leafy obscurity, fell back and laughed to
herself, like a very schoolgirl.

It was three weeks later, and Madison Wayne was again sitting alone in
his cabin. This solitude had become of more frequent occurrence lately,
since Arthur had revolted and openly absented himself from his religious
devotions for lighter diversions of the Bar. Keenly as Madison felt his
defection, he was too much preoccupied with other things to lay much
stress upon it, and the sting of Arthur's relapse to worldliness and
folly lay in his own consciousness that it was partly his fault. He
could not chide his brother when he felt that his own heart was absorbed
in his neighbor's wife, and although he had rigidly adhered to his own
crude ideas of self-effacement and loyalty to McGee, he had been again
and again a visitor at his house. It was true that Mrs. McGee had
made this easier by tacitly accepting his conditions of their