The Border Legion

"No. For I love you."

"You don't love me. It's a blacker crime to murder the soul than the

body."

Something in his strange eyes inspired Joan with a flashing,

reviving divination. Back upon her flooded all that tide of woman's

subtle incalculable power to allure, to charge, to hold. Swiftly she

went close to Kells. She stretched out her hands. One was bleeding

from rough contract with the log wall during the struggle. Her

wrists were red, swollen, bruised from his fierce grasp.

"Look! See what you've done. You were a beast. You made me fight

like a beast. My hands were claws--my whole body one hard knot of

muscle. You couldn't hold me--you couldn't kiss me. ... Suppose you

ARE able to hold me--later. I'll only be the husk of a woman. I'll

just be a cold shell, doubled-up, unrelaxed, a callous thing never

to yield. ... All that's ME, the girl, the woman you say you love--

will be inside, shrinking, loathing, hating, sickened to death. You

will only kiss--embrace--a thing you've degraded. The warmth, the

sweetness, the quiver, the thrill, the response, the life--all that

is the soul of a woman and makes her lovable will be murdered."

Then she drew still closer to Kells, and with all the wondrous

subtlety of a woman in a supreme moment where a life and a soul hang

in the balance, she made of herself an absolute contrast to the

fierce, wild, unyielding creature who had fought him off.

"Let me show--you the difference," she whispered, leaning to him,

glowing, soft, eager, terrible, with her woman's charm. "Something

tells me--gives me strength. ... What MIGHT be! ... Only barely

possible--if in my awful plight--you turned out to be a man, good

instead of bad! ... And--if it were possible--see the differences--

in the woman. ... I show you--to save my soul!"

She gave the fascinated Kells her hands, slipped into his arms, to

press against his breast, and leaned against him an instant, all one

quivering, surrendered body; and then lifting a white face, true in

its radiance to her honest and supreme purpose to give him one

fleeting glimpse of the beauty and tenderness and soul of love, she

put warm and tremulous lips to his.

Then she fell away from him, shrinking and terrified. But he stood

there as if something beyond belief had happened to him, and the

evil of his face, the hard lines, the brute softened and vanished in

a light of transformation.

"My God!" he breathed softly. Then he awakened as if from a trance,

and, leaping down the steps, he violently swept aside the curtain

and disappeared.