on the Rock; and they knew it. I told you that morning we met when we were in that cabin—remember?"
"Remember?" he repeated.
"I said you might be—any one!" she recalled, gazing up at him with eyes suddenly wet. "You are not—not just an outcast born in an Indian hut. I don't think I'd care if you were! But we know there was a reason why your mother had to go there! And my people were back of that reason. Besides them, I think Quinlan knew it; and they had to kill him to stop him from finding you. The burden of proving respectability—if either of us is thinking of that—is on my people, I'd say; not on you!"
"Miss Carew!" he protested again. He still stood away from her, but she could see him trembling; she herself was quivering.
She had not intended to say what she had; but having said it, she meant it. She would not care if he were an outcast born in a Chippewa shack; but the certainty that he was not was never clearer to her than now. He had seemed to her "some one" that morning when she first saw him when he was in his rough army coat and surrounded only by travelers on the northern woods train; this feeling had deepened during her companionship with him on their way to St. Florentin and afterwards. But there, too, he had been in rough environment. Here he was in Agnes's drawing-room; and as Ethel gazed at him, she felt that her cousin Bennet—or, indeed, any other man whom she knew—had been far more out of place in this room than Barney. It was not alone the natural ease of his tall, well-formed figure; he possessed that attribute which Ethel could define no more distinctly to herself than by thinking of him as "well-born." The word
