"That's a good girl, Nora," he said. "That'll help her."
He left then and, when the ring of his spurs had been lost in the lazy afternoon, the girl sat suddenly in the chair on which she had busied herself and pressed the dustcloth hard against her eyes. She drew a long, sharp breath. Then, she stood erect and muttered,
Then, stolidly, with set mouth, she went on with her work, movements a little slower, perhaps, a bit lethargic, surely, bungling now and then. Something had gone from her ... a hope, a sustaining spark, a leaven that had lightened the drudgery.
Upstairs in her room Ann Lytton lay face down on her bed, hands gripping the coarse coverlet, eyes pressed shut, breath swift and irregular, heart racing. What had gone from the girl below--the hope, the spark, the leaven which makes life itself palatable--had come to her after those years of nightmare, and Ann was resisting, driving it back, telling herself that it must not be, that it could not be, not in the face of all that had happened; not now, when ethical, moral, legal ties bound her to another! Oh, she was bound, no mistaking that; but it was not Ann's heart that wrenched at the bonds. It was her conscience, her trained sense of right and wrong, the traditions that had moulded her. No, her heart was gone, utterly, to the man who crossed the hard, beaten street of Yavapai, head down, dejection in the swing of his shoulders, for her heart knew no right, no wrong ... only beauty and ugliness.
Bayard, too, fought his bitter fight. The urge in him was to take her, to bear her away, to defy the laws that men had made to hurt her and to devil him; but something behind, something deep in him, forbade. He must go on, nursing back to strength that mockery of manhood who could lift his fuddled, obscene head and, with the blessing of society, claim Ann Lytton as his--her body, her soul! He must go on, though he wanted to strangle all life from the drunken ruin, because in him was the same rigid adherence to things that have been which held the woman there on her bed, face down, even though her limbs twitched to race after him and her arms yearned to twine about his neck, to pull herself close to his good chest, within which the great heart pumped.