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SON OF THE WIND

Carron's hold on her relaxed. "Lord, you don't expect me to let him go again, do you?"

He could feel her fingers that had grasped his arms with such energy growing limp on his sleeve. Her eyes, growing cold, were fixed on his, all the woman, body and mind, suddenly deprived of motion. "You're not going to keep him," she said, and let the end of the sentence fall as if that fact had been fixed before the world began.

"But I have him!" Carron objected. He felt astonished that she did not see the argument there, how perfectly achievement gives the right to hold. That had been the fixed sign of his life. He never doubted it. The comprehension of what she expected of him, the full, preposterous size of it, shot up before him, and he laughed. "Turn him loose again now? That's too much to ask, too much to ask of any man!"

"But you said—" She looked bewildered, a lost traveler, stumbling in a dark continent. "You said it was a bad business. You said it was all wrong—that you hadn't known what you were doing—You asked me to forgive you!"

"Yes, I know," he explained patiently, wondering how she could be so stupid. "But that was for not telling you what I had done, deceiving you, if you

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