--he turned his head with a gesture of hopelessness--"an empty
world forever. I have told you now. But you could not understand
and believe unless I did. I love you."

He spoke as quietly and with as little passion in his voice as if
he were speaking the words from a book. But their very quietness
made them convincing. She started, and the colour left her face.
Then it returned, flooding her cheeks with a feverish glow.

"In that is the danger," she said quickly. "But you have spoken
the words as I would have had you speak them. It is this danger
that must be buried--deep--deep. And you will bury it. You will
urge no questions that I do not wish to answer. You will fight for
me, blindly, knowing only that what I ask you to do is not sinful
nor wrong. And in the end--"

She hesitated. Her face had grown as tense as his own.

"And in the end," she whispered, "your greatest reward can be only
the knowledge that in living this knighthood for me you have won
what I can never give to any man. The world can hold only one such
man for a woman. For your faith must be immeasurable, your love as
pure as the withered violets out there among the rocks if you live
up to the tests ahead of you. You will think me mad when I have
finished. But I am sane. Off there, in the Snowbird Lake country,
is my home. I am alone. No other white man or woman is with me. As
my knight, the one hope of salvation that I cling to now, you will
return with me to that place--as my husband. To all but ourselves
we shall be man and wife. I will bear your name--or the one by
which you must be known. And at the very end of all, in that hour