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Marion, near him, her hands folded in her lap, looked sometimes out of the window but more often at him, though his eyes avoided hers. She was scarcely less pale than he, and very tired and worn. Despite Hillyer's protestations she had slept little in the ten days of Philip's peril; for she would trust no one but herself to do with iron determination exactly what the doctor had commanded.
The pathos of it! It comes before me often and often. At that very time, poor thing, I was girding up my conscience to make him move on again! Hillyer's heart is better than mine, better than anybody's in the community, I suppose, for he is the one friend of the black sheep of the camp Flint Buckner and the only man Flint ever talks with or allows to talk with him.
Claire had stood quite silent, with her blue eyes opening wider and wider, for the moment helpless, but trusting more to Hillyer's resources of diplomacy than to her husband's self-control. Now her face crimsoned with mortification, and she stood up with all the inches of her five foot two. "You'll do no such thing!" she cried, and one little heel came down on the floor with a jolt. "The idea!
A cruel time he has given me, yet I give you my honor I have never harmed him nor any man. That was the end of the story, and it stirred those boys to blood-heat, be sure of it. As for me each word burnt a hole in me where it struck. We voted that the old man should bunk with us, and be my guest and Hillyer's.
Hillyer's loyal heart was near to bursting with joy. In all the days of his eager courtship Marion had never seemed so close to him, so fairly within his grasp, as now. She had welcomed him with totally unexpected warmth, considering the many times she had rejected him, and considering, too, the letter he had received from her on her departure. Absence, he thought, had advanced his cause for him.
She was delicately calling Seth's attention to the pleasure, the profits, and the sanctity of politeness, when she caught sight of Hillyer's automobile emerging slowly and silently from the trees that concealed the road at a little distance from the corrals. "There he is now!" she exclaimed. And then, an instant later: "Why, he's alone!"
As she mounted the garden steps to the house, she heard the whirr of a motor in the street. It stopped in front of the house, and as Margaret waited she heard Mrs. Hillyer's thin voice: "I am so sorry! Please tell Mrs. Pole that I came over from Lancaster to get her for dinner." Presently the motor whirled away in the direction of the great hotel, a cloud of dust following in its wake.
He had meant, in the beginning, to ask how Marion had come to know Haig, and if they had been much together; but he now surmised that Huntington and his wife were as ignorant as himself of that acquaintanceship, or friendship, or whatever it was that could have made possible the astounding emotions he had seen on Marion's face. Hillyer's situation was difficult.
The machine, with a kind of shudder, responded to Hillyer's hand, and shot out with fresh speed. Another brief silence. "The cut-out!" she ordered. Hillyer bent to the mechanism, and the engine, with the muffler off, roared and shrieked as it took the smooth white road, with every bar and rivet throbbing under the pressure. Only then did Marion turn, and motion to Smythe.
'That saves two days. He gave the horses the whip again, and I started for Huntington's to tell you Watch out! There's the turn!" he shouted in Hillyer's ear. The wheels tore up the sand as the machine, with the power off but still going at more than half-speed under its momentum, skidded and scraped around the turn into Haig's road. "Now!" cried Marion.
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