"No, it's a hot night," he answered. "I'm too hot as it is." And he
loosened his heavy red shirt at the throat.

"If I've got to go to bed in half an hour," she said presently, "tell me
more about your Aunt Samantha, and about yourself, and your home before
you came out here, and what you did when you were a little boy--tell me
everything about yourself."

She was forgetting Tralee for the moment, and the man who raised his hand
against her yesterday, and the life she had lived. Or was it only that
she had grown young during these last two months, and the young can so
easily forget!

"You want to hear? You really want to hear?" he asked. "Say, it won't
be a very interesting story. Better let me tell you about the broncho-
busting today."

"No, I want to hear about yourself." She looked intently at him for an
instant, and then her eyes closed and the long lashes touched her cheek.
There was something very wilful in her beauty, and her body too had
delicate, melancholy lines strange in one so young. She was not
conscious that, in her dreamy abstraction, she was leaning towards him.

It was but an instant, though it seemed to him an interminable time, in
which he fought the fierce desire to clasp her in his arms, and kiss the
lips which, to his ears, said things more wonderful than he had ever
dreamed of in his friendship with the night and the primrose moon. He
knew, however, that if he did, she would not go back to Tralee to-morrow;
that tomorrow she would defy the leviathan; and that tomorrow he would
not have the courage to say the things he must say to the evil-hearted