"I can't think clearly. I wonder if I am insane?" She went with heavy, leaden steps back to her room. A pale, weary face looked at her from her glass. She began arranging her hair. Her fingers, with wills of their own, refused to obey her own command laid upon them. She sought wildly to delay, delay to the last fragment of the last second before yielding to the inevitable; she wanted to loiter over her hair, and her fingers raced. She could hear voices downstairs. Gratton's voice, low and urgent; a thin, querulous voice; she shuddered. That would be the justice. Another voice, a man's and strange to her. He said nothing, but twice she heard him laugh, a laugh that jarred upon her nerves. She guessed who he would be; the man Gratton had sent to bring the justice.
"Gloria!" Gratton was calling from the foot of the steps.
The voice that answered for her was clear and steady and, downstairs, must have sounded untroubled: "I'm coming. Just a minute."
* * * * *
Two hours ago, while Gloria had been watching the shadows creeping among the pines, Mark King had arrived. He had come down the ridge from the rear and thus to the outbuilding by the stable which housed the caretaker, old Jim Spalding.
"Hello, Mark," Jim had said, a trifle startled by King's sudden appearance. "Here you come again, like a Injun out'n the woods."
Jim was smoking his pipe on his bench. King paused, saying: "Hello, Jim. Has Ben showed up yet?"
"No, he ain't showed, Mark. Expectin' him?"
"Yes. Who's in the house, then?"
"Why, some of 'em come on ahead. Ben's girl, for one, and that city guy, Gratton, for another. She didn't say anything about Ben comin'; she did say, though, the missis would be along pretty soon."
Gloria and Gratton here? King frowned. He had had ample time during the long weeks since the twelfth of August to decide that he had nothing to say to Gloria Gaynor. And now she was here--with Gratton. He turned into Jim's quarters. He had no desire--or at least so he told himself very emphatically--to see either one of them.
"I've hit the trail hard to-day, Jim," he said as Jim followed him and King closed the door. "And I'm dead tired and as hungry as a bear. What shape's the cupboard in?"
"Fine," returned Spalding hospitably. "You know me, Mark."
So it happened that while Gloria fought her losing battle all alone, Mark King sat at Spalding's table, not a hundred yards away, and made a silent meal of coffee and bread of Jim's crude baking, and a dubious, warmed-over stew. Thereafter King threw himself down on Jim's bunk and the two smoked their pipes. With nothing in particular to be said, virtually nothing was said.