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SON OF THE WIND

There the dear vanity of the woman spoke. Disloyal to every one else in the world, perhaps, but loyal to her!

"He will do anything for me," she said.

Carron could believe her there. What the fellow would do for her—which was to say for the sake of possessing her—had been made evident. He had been ready even to chance the risk of losing her for that. What he would do disinterestedly for her, was nothing. It had taken the horse-breaker just four days to add up Ferrier's mental sum; and the impulse was on his tongue to speak it. Speak not only that, but his own as well. The story of his coming and the reason of it. Couldn't he show her, as Rader had urged, his side of the business—risk his plea? But she was not his as yet, was she? He was not certain. She seemed to be hovering on the edge of giving herself up; suppose this question of his be all that was needed to startle her away?

"He hasn't and never has had a ghost of a reason to expect anything of me," she said. "Then, a few weeks ago, we had a misunderstanding about something, something he did that seemed to me not like a gentleman. We haven't been very good friends since then."

Carron clapped that information to the hint that the scholar had let fall, which was, that Ferrier

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