To him her suggestion was only a womanly kindness, tempered with womanly curiosity.

But the astonishment and stupefaction of her parents at this evident corroboration of suspicions they had as yet only half believed was tinged with superstitious dread.

Had she fallen in love with this helpless stranger?
or, more awful to contemplate, was he really no stranger, but a surreptitious lover thus strategically brought under her roof?
For once they refrained from open criticism.

The very magnitude of their suspicions left them dumb.
It was thus that the virgin Chatelaine of Burnt Ridge Ranch was left to gaze untrammeled upon her pale and handsome guest, whose silken, bearded lips and sad, childlike eyes might have suggested a more Exalted Sufferer in their absence of any suggestion of a grosser material manhood.

But even this imaginative appeal did not enter into her feelings.