"The whole duty of woman, Joan," he said, opening these eyes upon her, "can be expressed in just one little word—charm."

And again at her look of mystification he laughed aloud.

"There's—there's babies," suggested Joan after a pause during which she evidently wrestled in vain with the true meaning of his speech.

"Dinner is served," said Prosper, rising quickly, and, getting back of her, he pushed her chair to the table, hiding in this way a silent paroxysm of mirth.

At dinner, Prosper, unlike Holliwell, made no attempt to draw Joan into talk, but sipped his wine and watched her, enjoying her composed silence and her slow, graceful movements. Afterwards he made a couch for her on the floor before the fire, two skins and a golden cushion, a rug of dull blue which he threw over her, hiding the ugly skirt and boots. He took a violin from the wall and tuned it, Joan watching him with all her eyes.

"I don't like what you're playin' now," she told him, impersonally and gently.

"I'm tuning up."

"Well, sir, I'd be gettin' tired of that if I was you."

"I'm almost done," said Prosper humbly.

He stood up near her feet at the corner of the hearth, tucked the instrument under his chin and played. It was the "Aubade Provencale," and he played it creditably, with fair skill and with some of the wizardry that his nervous vitality gave to everything he did. At the first note Joan started, her pupils enlarged, she lay still. At the end he saw that she was quivering and in tears.

He knelt down beside her, drew the hands from her face. "Why, Joan, what's the matter? Don't you like music?"

Joan drew a shaken breath. "It's as if it shook me in here, something trembles in my heart," she said. "I never heerd music before, jest whistlin'." And again she wept.

Prosper stayed there on his knee beside her, his chin in his hand. What an extraordinary being this was, what a magnificent wilderness. The thought of exploration, of discovery, of cultivation, filled him with excitement and delight. Such opportunities are rarely given to a man. Even that other most beautiful adventure—yes, he could think this already!—might have been tame beside this one. He looked long at Joan, long into the fire, and she lay still, with the brooding beauty of that first-heard melody upon her face.

It was the first music she had ever heard, "except whistlin'," but there had been a great deal of "whistlin'" about the cabin up Lone River; whistling of robins in spring—nothing sweeter—the chordlike whistlings of thrush and vireo after sunset, that bubbling "mar-guer-ite" with which the blackbirds woo, and the light diminuendo with which the bluebird caressed the air after an April flight. Perhaps Joan's musical faculty was less untrained than any other. After all, that "Aubade Provencale" was just the melodious story of the woods in spring. Every note linked itself to an emotional, subconscious memory. It filled Joan's heart with the freshness of childhood and pained her only because it struck a spear of delight into her pain. She was eighteen, she had grown like a tree, drinking in sunshine and storm, but rooted to a solitude where very little else but sense-experience could reach her mind. She had seen tragedies of animal life, lonely death-struggles, horrible flights and more horrible captures, she had seen joyous wooings, love-pinings, partings, and bereavements. She had seen maternal fickleness and maternal constancy, maternal savagery; the end of mated bliss and its—renewal. She had seen the relentless catastrophes of storm. There had been starving winters and renewing springs, sad beautiful autumns, the riotous waste and wantonness of summer. These had all been objective experiences, but Joan's untamed and undistracted heart had taken them in deeply and deeply pondered upon them. There was no morality in their teachings, unless it was the morality of complete suspension of any judgment whatsoever, the marvelous literal, "Judge not." She knew that the sun shone on the evil and on the good, but she knew also that frost fell upon the good as well as upon the evil nor was the evil to be readily distinguished. Her father prated of only one offense, her mother's sin. Joan knew that it was a man's right to kill his woman for "dealin's with another man." This law was human; it evidently did not hold good with animals. There was no bitterness, though some ferocity, in the traffic of their loves.

While she pondered through the first sleepless nights in this strange shelter of hers, and while the blizzard Prosper had counted on drove bayoneted battalions of snow across the plains and forced them, screaming like madmen, along the narrow canyon, Joan came slowly and fully to a realization of the motive of Pierre's deed. He had been jealous. He had thought that she was having dealings with another man. She grew hot and shamed. It was her father's sin, that branding on her shoulder, or, perhaps, going back farther, her mother's sin. Carver had warned Pierre—of the hot and smothered heart—to beware of Joan's "lookin' an' lookin' at another man." Now, in piteous woman fashion, Joan went over and over her memories of Pierre's love, altering them to fit her terrible experience. It was a different process from that simple seeing of pictures in the fire from which she had been startled by Pierre's return. A man's mind in her situation would have been intensely occupied with thoughts of the new companion, but Joan, thorough as a woman always is, had not yet caught up. She was still held by all the strong mesh of her short married life. She had simply not got as far as Prosper Gael. She accepted his hospitality vaguely, himself even more vaguely. When she would be done with her passionate grief, her laborious going-over of the past, her active and tormenting anger with the lover whom Prosper had told her was dead, then it would be time to study this other man. As for her future, she had no plans at all. Joan's life came to her as it comes to a child, unsullied by curiosity. At this time Prosper was infinitely the more curious, the more excited of the two.



CHAPTER XII

A MATTER OF TASTE

"What are you writin' so hard for, Mr. Gael?" Joan voiced the question wistfully on the height of a long breath. She drew it from a silence which seemed to her to have filled this strange, gay house for an eternity. For the first time full awareness of the present cut a rift in the troubled cloudiness of her introspection. She had been sitting in her chair, listless and wan, now staring at the flames, now following Wen Ho's activities with absent eyes. A storm was swirling outside. Near the window, Prosper, a figure of keen absorption, bent over his writing-table, his long, fine hand driving the pencil across sheet after sheet. He looked like a machine, so regular and rapid was his work. A sudden sense of isolation came upon Joan. What part had she in the life of this companion, this keeper of her own life? She felt a great need of drawing nearer to him, of finding the humanity in him. At first she fought the impulse, reserve, pride, shyness locking her down, till at last her nerves gave her such torment that her fingers knitted into each other and on the outbreathing of a desperate sigh she spoke.

"What are you writin' so hard for, Mr. Gael?"

At once Prosper's hand laid down its pencil and he turned about in his chair and gave her a gleaming look and smile. Joan was fairly startled. It was as if she had touched some mysterious spring and turned on a dazzling, unexpected light. As a matter of fact, Prosper's heart had leapt at her wistful and beseeching voice.

He had been biding his time. He had absorbed himself in writing, content to leave in suspense the training of his enchanted leopardess. Half-absent glimpses of her desolate beauty as she moved about his winter-bound house, contemplation of her unself-consciousness as she companioned his meals, the pleasure he felt in her rapt listening to his music in the still, frost-held evenings by the fire—these he had made enough. They quieted his restlessness, soothed the ache of his heart, filled him with a warm and patient desire, different from any feeling he had yet experienced. He was amused by her lack of interest in him. He was not accustomed to such through-gazing from beautiful eyes, such incurious absence of questioning. She evidently accepted him as a superior being, a Providence; he was not a man at all, not of the same clay as Pierre and herself. Prosper had waited understandingly enough for her first move. When the personal question came, it made a sort of crash in the expectant silence of his heart.

Before answering, except by that smile, he lit himself a cigarette; then, strolling to the fire, he sat on the rug below her, drawing his knees up into his hands.

"I'd like to tell you about my writing, Joan. After all, it's the great interest of my life, and I've been fairly seething with it; only I didn't want to bother you, worry your poor, distracted head."

"I never thought," said Joan slowly, "I never thought you'd be carin' to tell me things. I know so awful little."

"It wasn't your modesty, Joan. It was simply because you haven't given me a thought since I dragged you in here on my sled. I've been nothing"—under the careless, half-bitter manner, he was weighing his words and their probable effect—"nothing, for all these weeks, but—a provider."

"A provider?" Joan groped for the meaning of the word. It came, and she flushed deeply. "You mean I've just taken things, taken your kind doin's toward me an' not been givin' you a thought." Her eyes filled and shone mortification down upon him so that he put his hand quickly over hers, tightened together on her knee.

"Poor girl! I'm not reproaching you."

"But, Mr. Gael, I wanted to work for you. You wouldn't let me." She brushed away her tears. "What can I do? Where can I go?"

"You can stay here and make me happy as you have been doing ever since you came. I was very unhappy before. And you can give me just as much or as little attention as you please. I don't ask you for a bit more. Suppose you stop grieving, Joan, and try to be just a little happier yourself. Take an interest in life. Why, you poor, young, ignorant child, I could open whole worlds of excitement, pleasure, to you, if you'd let me. There's more in life than you've dreamed of experiencing. There's music, for one thing, and there are books and beauty of a thousand kinds, and big, wonderful thoughts, and there's companionship and talk. What larks we could have, you and I, if you would care—I mean, if you would wake up and let me show you how. You do want to learn a woman's work, don't you, Joan?"

She shook her head slowly, smiling wistfully, the tears gone from her eyes, which were puzzled, but diverted from pain. "I didn't savvy what you meant when you talked about what a woman's work rightly was. An' I'm so awful ignorant, you know so awful much. It scares me, plumb scares me, to think how much you know, more than Mr. Holliwell! Such books an' books an' books! An' writin' too. You see I'd be no help nor company fer you. I'd like to listen to you. I'd listen all day long, but I'd not be understandin'. No more than I understand about that there woman's work idea."

He laughed at her, keeping reassuring eyes on hers. "I can explain anything. I can make you understand anything. I'll grant you, my idea of a woman's work is difficult for you to get hold of. That's a big question, after all, one of the biggest. But—just to begin with and we'll drop it later for easier things—I believe, the world believes, that a woman ought to be beautiful. You can understand that?"

Joan shook her head. "It's a awful hard sayin', Mr. Gael. It's awful hard to say you had ought to be somethin' a person can't manage for themselves. I mean—" poor Joan, the inarticulate, floundered, but he left her, rather cruelly, to flounder out. "I mean, that's an awful hard sayin' fer a homely woman, Mr. Gael."

He laughed. "Oh," said he with a gesture, "there is no such thing as a homely woman. A homely woman simply does not count." He got up, looked for a book, found it, opened it, and brought it to her. "Look at that picture, Joan. What do you think of it?"

It was of a woman, a long-drawn, emaciated creature, extraordinarily artificial in her grace and in the pose and expression of her ugly, charming form and features. She had been aided by hair-dresser and costumer and by her own wit, aided into something that made of her an arresting and compelling picture. "What do you think of her, Joan?" smiled Prosper Gael.

Joan screwed up her eyes distastefully. "Ain't she queer, Mr. Gael? Poor thing, she's homely!"

He clapped to the book. "A matter of educated taste," he said. "You don't know beauty when you see it. If you walked into a drawing-room by the side of that marvelous being, do you think you'd win a look, my dear girl? Why, your great brows and your great, wild eyes and your face and form of an Olympian and your free grace of a forest beast—why, they wouldn't be noticed. Because, Joan, that queer, poor thing knew woman's work from A to Z. She's beautiful, Joan, beautiful as God most certainly never intended her to be. Why, it's a triumph—it's something to blow a trumpet over. It's art!"

He returned the volume and came back to stand by the mantel, half-turned from her, looking down into the fire. For the moment, he had created in himself a reaction against his present extraordinary experiment, his wilderness adventure. He was keenly conscious of a desire for civilized woman, for her practiced tongue, her poise, her matchless companionship....

Joan spoke, "You mean I'm awful homely, Mr. Gael?"

The question set him to laughing outrageously. Joan's pride was stung.

"You've no right to laugh at me," she said. "I'd not be carin' what you think." And she left him, moving like an angry stag, head high, light-stepping.

He went back to his work, not at all in regret at her pique and still amused by the utter femininity of her simple question.

Before dinner he rapped at her door. "Joan, will you do me a favor?"

A pause, then, in her sweet, vibrant voice, she answered, "I'd be doin' anything fer you, Mr. Gael."

"Then, put on these things for dinner instead of your own clothes, will you?"

She opened the door and he piled into her arms a mass of shining silk, on top of it a pair of gorgeous Chinese slippers.

"Do it to please me, even if you think it makes you look queer, will you, Joan?"

"Of course," she smiled, looking up from the gleaming, sliding stuff into his face. "I'd like to, anyway. Dressing-up—that's fun."

And she shut the door.

She spread the silk out on the bed and found it a loose robe of dull blue, embroidered in silver dragons and lined with brilliant rose. There was a skirt of this same rose-colored stuff. In one weighted pocket she found a belt of silver coins and a little vest of creamy lace. There were rose silk stockings stuffed into the shoes. Joan eagerly arrayed herself. She had trouble with the vest, it was so filmy, so vaguely made, it seemed to her, and to wear it at all she had to divest herself altogether of the upper part of her coarse underwear. Then it seemed to her startlingly inadequate even as an undergarment. However, the robe did go over it, and she drew that close and belted it in. It was provided with long sleeves and fell to her ankles. She thrilled at the delightful clinging softness of silk stockings and for the first time admired her long, round ankles and shapely feet. The Chinese slippers amused her, but they too were beautiful, all embroidered with flowers and dragons.

She felt she must look very queer, indeed, and went to the mirror. What she saw there surprised her because it was so strange, so different. Pierre had not dealt in compliments. His woman was his woman and he loved her body. To praise this body, surrendered in love to him, would have been impossible to the reverence and reserve of his passion.

Now, Joan brushed and coiled her hair, arranging it instinctively, but perhaps a little in imitation of that queer picture that had looked to her so hideous. Then, starting toward the door at Wen Ho's announcement of "Dinner, lady," she was quite suddenly overwhelmed by shyness. From head to foot for the first time in all her life she was acutely conscious of herself.



CHAPTER XIII

THE TRAINING OF A LEOPARDESS

On that evening Prosper began to talk. The unnatural self-repression he had practiced gave way before the flood of his sociability. It was Joan's amazing beauty as she stumbled wretchedly into the circle of his firelight, her neck drawn up to its full length, her head crowned high with soft, black masses, her lids dropped under the weight of shyness, vivid fright in her distended pupils, scarlet in her cheeks,—Joan's beauty of long, strong lines draped to advantage for the first time in soft and clinging fabrics,—that touched the spring of Prosper's delighted egotism. There it was again, the ideal audience, the necessary atmosphere, the beautiful, gracious, intelligent listener. He forgot her ignorance, her utter simplicity, the unplumbed emptiness of her experience, and he spread out his colorful thoughts before her in colorful words, the mental plumage of civilized courtship.

After dinner, now sipping from the small coffee cup in his hand, now setting it down to move excitedly about the room, he talked of his life, his book, his plans. He told anecdotes, strange adventures; he drew his own inverted morals; he sketched his fantastic opinions; he was in truth fascinating, a speaking face, a lithe, brilliant presence, a voice of edged persuasion. He turned witty phrases. Poor Joan! One sentence in ten she understood and answered with her slow smile and her quaint, murmured, "Well!" His eloquence did her at least the service of making her forget herself. She was rather crestfallen because he had not complimented her; his veiled look of appreciation, this coming to of his real self was too subtle a flattery for her perception. Nevertheless, his talk pleased her. She did not want to disappoint him, so she drew herself up straight in the big red-lacquered chair, sipped her coffee, in dainty imitation of him, gave him the full, deep tribute of her gaze, asked for no explanations and let the astounding statements he made, the amazing pictures he drew, cut their way indelibly into her most sensitive and preserving memory.

Afterwards, at night, for the first time she did not weep for Pierre, the old lost Pierre who had so changed into a torturer, but, wakeful, her brain on fire, she pondered over and over the things she had just heard, feeling after their meaning, laying aside for future enlightenment what was utterly incomprehensible, arguing with herself as to the truth of half-comprehended speeches—an ignorant child wrestling with a modern philosophy, tricked out in motley by a ready wit.

There were more personal memories that gave her a flush of pleasure, for after midnight, as she was leaving him, he came near to her, took her hand with a grateful "Joan, you've done so much for me to-night, you've made me happy," and the request, "You won't put your hair back to the old way, will you? You will wear pretty things, if I give them to you, won't you?" in a beseeching spoiled-boy's voice, very amusing and endearing to her.

He gave her the "pretty things," whole quantities of them, fine linen to be made up into underwear, soft white and colored silks and crepes, which Joan, remembering the few lessons in dressmaking she had had from Maud Upper and with some advice from Prosper, made up not too awkwardly, accepting the mystery of them as one of Prosper's magic-makings. And, in the meantime, her education went on. Prosper read aloud to her, gave her books to read to herself, questioned her, tutored her, scolded her so fiercely sometimes that Joan would mount scarlet cheeks and open angry eyes. One day she fairly flung her book from her and ran out of the room, stamping her feet and shedding tears. But back she came presently for more, thirsting for knowledge, eager to meet her trainer on more equal grounds, to be able to answer him to some purpose, to contradict him, to stagger ever so slightly the self-assurance of his superiority.

And Prosper enjoyed the training of his captive leopardess, though he sometimes all but melted over the pathos of her and had much ado to keep his hands from her unconscious young beauty.

"You're so changed, Joan," he said one day abruptly. "You've grown as thin as a reed, child; I can see every bone, and your eyes—don't you ever shut them any more?"

Joan, prone on the skin before the fire, elbows on the fur, hands to her temples, face bent over a book, looked up impatiently.

"I'd not be talkin' now if I was you, Mr. Gael. You had ought to be writin' an' I'm readin'. I can't talk an' read; seems when I do a thing I just hed to do it!"

Prosper laughed and returned chidden to his task, but he couldn't help watching her, lying there in her blue frock across his floor, like a tall, thin Magdalene, all her rich hair fallen wildly about her face. She was such a child, such a child!



CHAPTER XIV

JOAN RUNS AWAY

It was a January night when Joan, her rough head almost in the ashes, had read "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" by the light of flames. It was in March, a gray, still afternoon, when, looking through Prosper's bookcase, she came upon the tale again.

Prosper was outdoors cutting a tunnel, freshly blocked with snow, and Joan, having finished the "Life of Cellini," a writer she loathed, but whose gorgeous fabrications her master had forced her to read, now hurried to the book-shelves in search of something more to her taste. She had the gay air of a holiday-seeker, returned "Cellini" with a smart push, and kneeling, ran her finger along the volumes, pausing on a binding of bright blue-and-gold. It was the color that had pleased her and the fat, square shape, also the look of fair and well-spaced type. She took the book and squatted on the rug happy as a child with a new toy of his own choosing.

And then she opened her volume in its middle and her eye looked upon familiar lines—

"So the two brothers and their murdered man—" Joan's heart fell like a leaden weight and the color dropped from her face. In an instant she was back in Pierre's room and the white night circled her in great silence and she was going over the story of her love and Pierre's—their love, their beautiful, grave, simple love that had so filled her life. And now where was she? In the house of the man who had killed her husband! She had been waiting for Holliwell, but for a long while now she had forgotten that. Why was she still here? A strange, guilty terror came with the question. She looked down at the soft, yellow crepe of the dress she had just made and she looked at her hands lying white and fine and useless, and she felt for the high comb Prosper had put into her hair. Then she stared around the gorgeous little room, snug from the world, so secret in its winter canyon. She heard Wen Ho's incessant pattering in the kitchen, the crunch and thud of Prosper's shoveling outside. It was suddenly a horrible nightmare, or less a nightmare than a dream, pleasant in the dreaming, but hideous to an awakened mind. She was awake. Isabella's story had thrown her mind, so abruptly dislocated, back to a time before the change, back to her old normal condition of a young wife. That little homestead of Pierre's! Such a hunger opened in her soul that she bent her head and moaned. She could think of nothing now but those two familiar, bare, clean rooms—Pierre's gun, Pierre's rod, her own coat there by the door, the snowshoes. There was no place in her mind for the later tragedy. She had gone back of it. She would rather be alone in her own home, desolate though it was, than anywhere else in all the homeless world.

And what could prevent her from going? She laughed aloud,—a short, defiant laugh,—rippled to her feet, and, in her room, took off Prosper's "pretty things" and got into her own old clothes; the coarse underwear, the heavy stockings and boots, the rough skirt, the man's shirt. How loosely they all hung! How thin she was! Now into her coat, her woolen cap down over her ears, her gloves—she was ready, her heart laboring like an exhausted stag's, her knees trembling, her wrists mysteriously absent. She went into the hall, found her snowshoes, bent to tie them on, and, straightening up, met Prosper who had come in out of the snow.

He was glowing from exercise, but at sight of her and her pale excitement, the glow left him and his face went bleak and grim. He put out his hand and caught her by the arm and she backed from him against the wall—this before either of them spoke.

"Where are you going, Joan?"

"I'm a-goin' home."

He let go of her arm. "You were going like this, without a word to me?"

"Mr. Gael," she panted, "I had a feelin' like you wouldn't 'a' let me go."

He turned, threw open the door, and stepped aside. She confronted his white anger.

"Mr. Gael, I left Pierre dead. I've been a-waitin' for Mr. Holliwell to come. I'm strong now. I must be a-goin' home." Suddenly, she blazed out: "You killed my man. What hev I to do with you?"

He bowed. Her breast labored and all the distress of her soul, troubled by an instinctive, inarticulate consciousness of evil, wavered in her eyes. Her reason already accused her of ingratitude and treachery, but every fiber of her had suddenly revolted. She was all for liberty, she must have it.

He was wise, made no attempt to hold her, let her go; but, as she fled under the firs, her webs sinking deep into the heavy, uncrusted snow, he stood and watched her keenly. He had not failed to notice the trembling of her body, the quick lift and fall of her breast, the rapid flushing and paling of her face. He let her go.

And Joan ran, drawing recklessly on the depleted store of what had always been her inexhaustible strength. The snow was deep and soft, heavy with moisture, the March air was moist, too, not keen with frost, and the green firs were softly dark against an even, stone-colored sky of cloud. To Joan's eyes, so long imprisoned, it was all astonishingly beautiful, clean and grave, part of the old life back to which she was running. Down the canyon trail she floundered, her short skirt gathering a weight of snow, her webs lifting a mass of it at every tugging step. Her speed perforce slackened, but she plodded on, out of breath and in a sweat. She was surprised at the weakness; put it down to excitement. "I was afeered he'd make me stay," she said, and, "I've got to go. I've got to go." This went with her like a beating rhythm. She came to the opening in the firs, the foot of the steep trail, and out there stretched the valley, blank snow, blank sky, here and there a wooded ridge, then a range of lower hills, blue, snow-mottled; not a roof, not a thread of smoke, not a sound.

"I'm awful far away," Joan whispered to herself, and, for the first time in her life, she doubted her strength. "I don't rightly know where I am." She looked back. There stood a high, familiar peak, but so were the outlines of these mountains jumbled and changed that she could not tell if Prosper's canyon lay north or south of Pierre's homestead. The former was high up on the foothills, and Pierre's was well down, above the river. From where she stood, there was no river-bed in sight. She tried to remember the journey, but nothing came to her except a confused impression of following, following, following. Had they gone toward the river first and then turned north or had they traveled close to the base of the giant range? The ranger's cabin where they had spent the night, surely that ought to be visible. If she went farther out, say beyond the wooded spur which shut the mountain country from her sight, perhaps she would find it.... She braced her quivering muscles and went on. The end of the jutting foothills seemed to crawl forward with her. She plunged into drifts, struggled up; sometimes the snow-plane seemed to stand up like a wall in front of her, the far hills lolling like a dragon along its top. She could not keep the breath in her lungs. Often she sank down and rested; when things grew steady she got up and worked on. Each time she rested, she crouched longer; each time made slower progress; and always the goal she had set herself, the end of that jutting hill, thrust itself out, nosed forward, sliding down to the plain. It began to darken, but Joan thought that her sight was failing. The enormous efforts she was making took every atom of her will. At last her muscles refused obedience, her laboring heart stopped. She stood a moment, swayed, fell, and this time she made no effort to rise. She had become a dark spot on the snow, a lifeless part of the loneliness and silence.

Above her, where the sharp peaks touched the clouds, there came a widening rift showing a cold, turquoise clarity. The sun was just setting and, as the cloud-banks lifted, strong shadows, intensely blue, pointed across the plain of snow. A small, black, energetic figure came out from among the firs and ran forward where the longest shadow pointed. It looked absurdly tiny and anxious; futile, in its pigmy haste, across the exquisite stillness. Joan, lying so still, was acquiescent; this little striving thing rebelled. It came forward steadily, following Joan's uneven tracks, stamping them down firmly to make a solid path, and, as the sun dropped, leaving an immense gleaming depth of sky, he came down and bent over the black speck that was Joan....

Prosper took her by the shoulder and turned her over a little in the snow. Joan opened her eyes and looked at him. It was the dumb look of a beaten dog.

"Get up, child," he said, "and come home with me."

She struggled to her feet, he helping her; and silently, just as a savage woman, no matter what her pain, will follow her man, so Joan followed the track he had made by pressing the snow down triply over her former steps. "Can you do it?" he asked once, and she nodded. She was pale, her eyes heavy, but she was glad to be found, glad to be saved. He saw that, and he saw a dawning confusion in her eyes. At the end he drew her arm into his, and, when they came into the house, he knelt and took the snowshoes from her feet, she drooping against the wall. He put a hand on each of her shoulders and looked reproach.

"You wanted to leave me, Joan? You wanted to leave me, as much as that?"

She shook her head from side to side, then, drawing away, she stumbled past him into the room, dropped to the bearskin rug, and held out her hands to the flames. "It's awful good to be back," she said, and fell to sobbing. "I didn't think you'd be carin'—I was thinkin' only of old things. I was homesick—me that has no home."

Her shaken voice was so wonderful a music that he stood listening with sudden tears in his eyes.

"An' I can't ferget Pierre nor the old life, Mr. Gael, an' when I think 't was you that killed him, why, it breaks my heart. Oh, I know you hed to do it. I saw. An' I know I couldn't 'a' stayed with him no more. What he did, it made me hate him—but you can't be thinkin' how it was with Pierre an' me before that night. We—we was happy. I ust to live with my father, Mr. Gael, an' he was an awful man, an' there was no lovin' between us, but when I first seen Pierre lookin' up at me, I first knowed what lovin' might be like. I just came away with him because he asked me. He put his hand on my arm an' said, 'Will you be comin' home with me, Joan Carver?' That was the way of it. Somethin' inside of me said, 'Yes,' fer all I was too scairt to do anything but look at him an' shake my head. An' the next mornin' he was there with his horses. Oh, Mr. Gael, I can't ferget him, even for hatin'. That brand on my shoulder, it's all healed, but my heart's so hurted, it's so hurted. An' when I come to thinkin' of how kind an' comfortin' you are an' what you've been a-doin' fer me, why, then, at the same time, I can't help but thinkin' that you killed my Pierre. You killed him. Fergive me, please; I would love you if I could, but somethin' makes me shake away from you—because Pierre's dead."

Again she wept, exhausted, broken-hearted weeping it was. And Prosper's face was drawn by pity of her. That story of her life and love, it was a sort of saga, something as moving as an old ballad most beautifully sung. He half-guessed then that she had genius; at least, he admitted that it was something more than just her beauty and her sorrow that so greatly stirred him. To speak such sentences in such a voice—that was a gift. She had no more need of words than had a symphony. The varied and vibrant cadences of her voice gave every delicate shading of feeling, of thought. She was utterly expressive. All night, after he had seen her eat and sent her to her bed, the phrases of her music kept repeating themselves in his ears. "An' so I first knowed what lovin' might be like"; and, "I would love you, only somethin' makes me shake away from you—because Pierre's dead." This was a Joan he had not yet realized, and he knew that after all his enchanted leopardess was a woman and that his wooing of her had hardly yet begun. So did she baffle him by the utter directness of her heart. There was so little of a barrier against him and yet—there was so much. For the first time, he doubted his wizardry, and, at that, his desire for the wild girl's love stood up like a giant and gripped his soul.

Joan slept deeply without dreams; she had confessed herself. But Prosper was as restless and troubled as a youth. She had not made her escape; she had followed him home with humility, with confusion in her eyes. She had been glad to hold out her hands again to the fire on his hearth. And yet—he was now her prisoner.



CHAPTER XV

NERVES AND INTUITION

"Mr. Gael," said Joan standing before him at the breakfast-table, "I'm a-goin' to work."

She was pale, gaunt, and imperturbable. He gave her a quick look, one that turned to amusement, for Joan was really as appealing to his humor as a child. She had such immense gravity, such intensity over her one-syllable statements of fact. She announced this decision and sat down.

"Woman's work?" he asked her, smiling quizzically.

"No, sir," with her own rare smile; "I ain't rightly fitted for that."

"Certainly not in those clothes," he murmured crossly, for she was dressed again in her own things.

"I'm a-goin' to do man's work. I'm a-goin' to shovel snow an' help fetch wood an' kerry in water. You tell your Chinese man, please."

"And you're not going to read or study any more?"

"Yes, sir. I like that. If you still want to teach me, Mr. Gael. But I'm a-goin'—I'm going—to get some action. I'll just die if I don't. Why, I'm so poor I can't hardly lift a broom. I don't know why I'm so miserably poor, Mr. Gael."

She twisted her brows anxiously.

"You've had a nervous breakdown."

"A what?"

"A nervous breakdown."

He lit his cigarette and watched her in his usual lazy, smoke-veiled manner, but she might have noticed the shaken fabric of his self-assurance.

"Say, now," said Joan, "what's that the name for?"

"There's a book about it over there—third volume on the top shelf—look up your case."

With an air of profound alarm, she went over and took it out.

"There's books about everything, ain't there?—isn't there,—Mr. Gael? Why, there's books about lovin' an' about sickness an' about cattle an' what-not, an' about women an' children—" She was shirking the knowledge of her "case," but at last she pressed her lips together and opened the book. She fell to reading, growing anxiety possessed her face, she sat down on the nearest chair, she turned page after page. Suddenly she gave him a look of anger.

"I ain't none of this, Mr. Gael," she said, smote the page, rose with dignity, and returned the book.

He laughed so long and heartily that she was at last forced to join him. "You was—you were—jobbin' me, wasn't you?" she said, sighing relief. "Did you know what that volume said? It said like this—I'll read you about it—" She took the volume, found the place and read in a low tone of horror, he helping her with the hard words: "'One of the most frequent forms of phobia, common in cases of psychic neurasthenia, is agrophobia in which patients the moment they come into an open space are oppressed by an exaggerated feeling of anxiety. They may break into a profuse perspiration and assert that they feel as if chained to the ground....' And here, listen to this, 'batophobia, the fear that high things will fall, atrophobia, fear of thunder and lightning, pantophobia, the fear of every thing and every one'.... Well, now, ain't that too awful? An' you mean folks really get that way?"

Their talk was for some time of nervous diseases, Joan's horror increasing.

"Well, sir," said she, "lead me out an' shoot me if I get anyways like that! I believe it's caused by all that queer dressin' an' what-not. I feel like somethin' real to-day in this shirt an' all, an' when I get through some work I'll feel a whole lot better. Don't you say I'm one of those nervous breakdowns again, though, will you?" she pleaded.

"No, I won't, Joan. But don't make one of me, will you?"

"How's that?"

"By wearing those clothes all day and half the night. If you expect me to teach you, you'll have to do something for me, to make up for running away. You might put on pretty things for dinner, don't you think? Your nervous system could stand that?"

"My nervous system," drawled Joan, and added startlingly, for she did not often swear, "God!" It was an oath of scorn, and again Prosper laughed.

But he heard with a sort of terror the sound of her "man's work" to which she energetically applied herself. It meant the return of her strength, of her independence. It meant the shortening of her captivity. Before long spring would rush up the canyon in a wave of melting snow, crested with dazzling green, and the valley would lie open to Joan. She would go unless—had he really failed so utterly to touch her heart? Was she without passion, this woman with the deep, savage eyes, the lips, so sensuous and pure, the body so magnificently made for living? She was not defended by any training, she had no moral standards, no prejudices, none of the "ideals." She was completely open to approach, a savage. If he failed, it was a personal failure. Perhaps he had been too subtle, too restrained. She did not yet know, perhaps, what he desired of her. But he was afraid of rousing her hatred, which would be fully as simple and as savage as her love. That evening, after she had dressed to please him, and sat in her chair, tired, but with the beautiful, clean look of outdoor weariness on her face, and tried, battling with drowsiness, to give her mind to his reading and his talk, he was overmastered by his longing and came to her and knelt down, drawing down her hands to him, pressing his forehead on them.

For a moment she was stiff and still, then, "What is it, Mr. Gael?" she asked in a frightened half-voice.

He felt, through her body, the slight recoil of spirit, and drew away, and arose to his feet.

"You're angry?"

He laughed.

"Oh, no. I'm not angry; why should I be? I'm a superman. I'm made—let's say—of alabaster. Women with great eyes and wonderful voices and the beauty of broad-browed nymphs walking gravely down under forest arches, such women give me only a great, great longing to read aloud very slowly and carefully a 'Child's History of the English Race'!" He took the book, tossed it across the room, then stood, ashamed and defiant, laughing a little, a boy in disgrace.

Joan looked at him in profound bewilderment and dawning distress.

"Now," she said, "you are angry with me. You always are when you talk that queer way. Won't you please explain it to me, Mr. Gael?"

"No!" said he sharply. "I won't." And he added after a moment, "You'd better go to bed. You're sleepy and as stupid as an owl."

"Oh!"

"Yes. And you've destroyed what little superstitious belief I had left concerning something they tell little ignorant boys about a woman's intuition. You haven't got a bit. You're stupid and I'm tired of you—No, Joan, I'm not. Don't mind me. I'm only in fun. Please! Damn! I've hurt your feelings."

Her lips were quivering, her eyes full. "I try so awful hard," she said. It was a lovely, broken trail of music.

He bent over her and patted her shoulder. "Dear child! Joan, I won't be so disagreeable again. Only, don't you ever think of me?"

"Yes, yes; all the while I'm thinking of you. I wisht I could do more for you. Why do I make you so angry? I know I'm awful—awfully stupid and ignorant. I—I must drive you most crazy, but truly"—here she turned quickly in his arm and put her hands about his neck and laid her cheek against his shoulder—"truly, Mr. Gael, I'm awful fond of you." Then she drew quickly away, quivered back into the other corner of her great chair, put her face to her hands. "Only—I can't help seein'—Pierre."

Just her tone showed him that still and ghastly youth, and again he saw the brown hand that moved. He had stood between her and that sight. The man ought to have died. He did not deserve his life nor this love of hers. Even though he had failed to kill the man, he would not fail to kill her love for him, sooner or later, thought Prosper. If only the hateful spring would give him time. He must move her from her memory. She had put her hands about his neck, she had laid her head against his shoulder, and, if it had been the action of a child, then she would not have started from him with that sharp memory of Pierre.



CHAPTER XVI

THE TALL CHILD

There were times, even now, when Prosper tried to argue himself back into sardonic self-possession. "Pooh!" said his brain, "you were beside yourself over a loss and then you were shut in for months of winter alone with this mountain girl, so naturally you are off your balance." He would school himself while Joan shoveled outdoors. He would try to see her with critical, clear eyes when she strode in. But one look at her and he was bemused again. For now she was at a great height of beauty, vivid with growing strength and purpose, her lips calm and scarlet, her eyes bright and hopeful. In fact, Joan had made her plans. She would wait till spring, partly to get back her full strength, partly to make further progress in her studies, but mostly in order not to hurt this hospitable Prosper Gael. The naivete of her gratitude, of her delicate consideration for his feelings, which continually triumphed over an instinctive fear, would have filled him with amusement, perhaps with compunction, had he been capable of understanding them. She was truly sorry that she had hurt him by running away. She told herself she would not do that again. In the spring she would make him a speech of thankfulness and of farewell, and then she would tramp back to Pierre's homestead and win and hold Pierre's land. As yet, you see, Prosper entered very little into her conscious life. Somewhere, far down in her, there was a disturbance, a growing doubt, a something vague and troubling.... Joan had not learnt to probe her own heart. A sensation was not, or it was. She was puzzled by the feeling Prosper was beginning to cause her, a feeling of miserable complexity; but she was not yet mentally equipped for the confronting of complexity. It was necessary for an emotion to rush at Joan and throw down, as it were, her heart before she recognized it; even then she might not give it a name. She would act, however, and with violence.

So now she planned and worked and grew beautiful with work and planning, while Prosper curbed his passion and worked, too, and his instruments were delicate and deadly and his plans made no account of hers. Every word he read to her, every note he played for her, had its calculated effect. He worked on her subconsciousness, undermining her path, and at nights and in her sleep she grew aware of him.

But even now, in his cool and passionate heart there were moments of reaction, one at last that came near to wrecking his purpose.

"Your clothes are about done for, Joan," Prosper laughed one morning, watching her belt in her tattered shirt; "you'll soon look like Cophetua's beggar maid."

"I'm not quite barefoot yet." She held up a cracked boot.

"Joan—" He hesitated an instant, then got up from his desk, walked to a window, and looked out at the bright morning. The lake was ruffled with wind, the firs tossed, there were patches of brown-needled earth under his window; his eyes were startled by a strip of green where tiny yellow flowers trod on the very edge of the melting drift. The window was open to soft, tingling air that smelt of snow and of sun, of pines, of growing grass, of sap, of little leaf-buds. The birds were in loud chorus. For several minutes Prosper stared and listened.

"What is it, Mr. Gael?" asked Joan patiently.

He started. "Oh," he said without looking at her again, "I was going to tell you that there are a skirt and a sort of coat in—in a closet in the hall. Do you want to use them?"

She went out to look. In five minutes—he had gone back to his work at the desk—he heard her laugh, and, still laughing, she opened the door again.

"Oh, Mr. Gael, were you really thinking that I could wear these? Look."

He turned and looked at her. She had crowded her strong, lithe frame into a brown tweed suit, a world too narrow for her, and she was laughing heartily at herself and had come in to show him the misfit.

"These things, Mr. Gael," she said,—"they must have been made for a tall child."

Prosper had too far tempted his pain, and in her vivid phrase it came to life before him. She had painted a startling picture and he had seen that suit, so small and trim, before.

Joan saw his face grow white, his eyes stared through her. He drew a quick breath and winced away from her, hiding his face in his hands. A moment later he was weeping convulsively, with violence, his head down between his hands. Joan started toward him, but he made a wicked and repellent gesture. She fled into her room and sat, bewildered, on her bed.

All at once the question came to her: for whom had the delicate fabrics been bought, for whom had this suit been made? "It was his wife and she is dead," thought Joan, and very pitifully she took off the suit, laid it and the other things away, and sitting by her window rested her chin in her hands and stared out through the blue pines. Tears ran down her face because she was so sorry for Prosper's pain. And again, thought Joan, she had caused it, she who owed him everything. Yes, she was deeply sorry for Prosper, deeply; her whole heart was stirred. For the first time she had a longing to comfort him with her hands.

For all that day Prosper fled the house and went across the country, now fording a flood of melted snow, now floundering through a drift, now walking on springy sod, unaware of the soft spring, conscious only of a sort of fire in his breast. He suffered and he resented his suffering, and he would have killed his heart if, by so doing, he could have given it peace. And all day he did not once think of Joan, but only of the "tall child" for whom the gay canyon refuge had been built, but who had never set her slim foot upon its threshold. Sunset found him miles away in the foothills of a low, many-folded range across the plain. He was dog tired, so that for very exhaustion his brain had stopped its tormenting work. He lit a fire and sat by it, huddled in his coat, smoking, dozing, not able really to sleep for cold and hunger. The bright stars, flung all about the sky, mildly regarded hum. Coyotes mourned their loneliness and hunger near and far, and once, in the broken woods above him, a mountain lion gave its blood-curdling scream. Prosper hated the night and its beautiful desolation, he hated the God that had made this land. He cursed the dawn when it came delicately, spreading a green arc of radiance across the east. And then, as he arose stiffly, stamped out his fire, and started slowly on his way back, he was conscious of a passionate homesickness, not for the old life he had lost, but for his cabin, his bright hearth, his shut-in solitude, his Joan. Very dear and real and human she was, and her laughter had been sweet. He had shocked it to silence, he had repulsed her comforting hands. She had been so innocent of any desire to hurt him. He could not imagine her ever hurting any one, this broad-browed Joan. She was so kind. And now she must be anxious about him. She would have sat up by the fire all night.... His eagerness for her slighted comfort gave his lagging steps a certain vigor, the long walk back seemed very long, indeed. Noon was hot, but he found water and by sundown he came to the canyon trail. He wanted Joan as badly now as a hurt child wants its mother. He came, haggard and breathless, to the door, called "Joan," came into the warm little room and found it empty. Wen Ho, to be sure, pattered to meet him.

"Mister Gael been gone a long time, velly long, all night. Wen Ho, he fix bed, fix breakfast—oh, the lady? She gone out yestiddy, not come back. She leave a letter for him, there on the table."

Prosper took it, waved Wen Ho out, and, dropping into the big chair, opened the paper. There was Joan's big handwriting, that he himself had taught her. Before she could only sign her name.

Mister Gael, dere frend,—

You have ben too good to me an it has ben too hard for you to keep me when you were all the wile amissin her an it hurts me to think of how it must have ben terrible hard for you all this winter to see me where you had ben ust to seem her an me wearin her pretty things all the wile. Now dere frend this must not be no more. I will not stay to trouble you. You have ben awful free-hearted. When you come back from your wanderin an tryin to get over your bein so unhappy you will find your house quiet an peaceful an you will not be hurt by me no more. I am not able to say all I am feelin about your goodness an I hev not always ben as kind to you in my thoughts an axions but that has ben my own fault not yours. I want you to beleave this, Mister Gael. I am goin back to Pierre's ranch to work on his land an some day I will be hopin to see you come ridin in an I will keep on learnin as well as I can an mebbe you will not be ashamed of me. I feel awful bad to go but I would feel more bad to stay when it must hurt you so. Respectably

JOAN

There were blistered spots above that pathetic, mistaken signature. The poor girl had meant to sign herself "Respectfully," and somehow that half-broke his heart.

He drank the strong coffee Wen Ho brought for him, two great cups of it, and he ate a piece of broiled elk meat. Then he went out again and walked rapidly down the trail. It was not yet dark; the world was in a soft glow of rose and violet, opalescent lights. The birds were singing in a hundred chantries. And there, through the firs, a sight to stop his heart, Joan came walking toward him, graceful, free, a swinging figure, bareheaded, her rags girded beautifully about her. And up and up to him she came soundlessly over the pine needles and through the wet snow-patches, looking at him steadfastly and tenderly, without a smile. She came and stood before him, still without dropping her sad, grave look.

"Mr. Gael," she said, "I hev come back. I got out yonder an'"—her breast heaved and a sort of terror came into her eyes—"an' the world was awful lonely. There ain't a creature out yonder to care fer me, fer me to care fer. It seemed like as if it was all dead. I couldn't abear it."

She put out her hand wistfully asking for pity, but he fell upon his knees and wrapped his hungry arms about her. "Joan," he sobbed, "Joan! Don't leave me. Don't—I couldn't bear it!" He looked up at her, his worn face wet with tears. "Don't leave me, Joan! I want you. Don't you understand?"

Her deep gray eyes filled slowly with light, she put a hand on either side of his face and bent her lips to his. "I never thought you'd be wantin' me," she said.



CHAPTER XVII

CONCERNING MARRIAGE

And it was spring-time; these prisoners of frost were beautifully sensitive. They, too, with the lake and the aspens and the earth, the seeds and the beasts, had suffered the season of interment. In such fashion Nature makes possible the fresh undertakings of last summer's reckless prodigals; she drives them into her mock tomb and freezes their hearts—it is a little rest of death—so that they wake like turbulent bacchantes drunk with sleep and with forgetfulness. Love, spring says, is an eternal fact, welcome its new manifestations. Remating bluebirds built their nests near Joan's window; they were not troubled by sad recollections of last year's nests nor the young birds that flew away. It was another life, a resurrection. If they remembered at all, they remembered only the impulses of pleasure; they had somewhere before learned how to love, how to build; the past summers had given practice to their singing little throats and to their rapid wings. No ghosts forbade happiness and no God—man-voiced—saying, because he knew the ugly human aftermaths, hard sayings of "Be ye perfect."

What counsel was theirs for Joan and what had her human mentor taught her? He had taught her in one form or another the beauty of passion and its eternal sinlessness, for that was his sincere belief. By music he had taught her, by musical speech, by the preaching of heathen sage and the wit of modern arguers. He had given her all the moral schooling she had ever had and its golden rule was, "Be ye beautiful and generous." Joan was both beautiful and made for giving, "free-hearted" as she might herself have said, Friday's child as the old rhyme has it,—and to cry out to her with love, saying, "I want you, Joan," was just, sooner or later, to see her turn and bend her head and hold out her arms. Prosper had the reward of patience; his wild leopardess was tamed to his hand and her sweetness made him tender and very merciful.

Their gay, little house stood open all day while they explored the mountains and plunged into the lake, choosing the hot hour of noon. Joan made herself mistress of the house and did her woman's work at last of tidying and beautifying and decking corners with gorgeous branches of blossoms while Prosper worked at his desk. He was happy; the reality of Joan's presence had laid his ghost just as the reality of his had laid hers. His work went on magically and added the glow of successful creation to the glow of satisfied desire. And his sin of deceit troubled him very little, for he had worked out that problem and had decided that Pierre, dead or alive, was unworthy of this mate.

But sometimes in her sleep Joan would start and moan feeling the touch of the white-hot iron on her shoulder. Her hatred of Pierre's cruelty, her resolution to be done with him forever, must have vividly renewed itself in those dreams, for she would cling to Prosper like a frightened child, and wake, trembling, happy to find herself safe in his arms.

So they lived their spring. Wen Ho, the silent and inscrutable, went out of the valley for provisions, and during his absence Joan queened it in the kitchen. She was learning to laugh, to see the absurd, delightful twists of daily living, to mock Prosper's oddities as he mocked hers. She was learning to be a comrade and she was learning better speech and more exquisite ways. It was inevitable that she should learn. Prosper, in these days, spent his whole soul upon her, fed her with music and delight, and he trained her to sing her sagas so that every day her voice gained in power and flexible sweetness. She would sing, since he told her to, her voice beating its wings against the walls of the house or ringing down the canyon in untrammeled flight. Prosper was lost in wonder of her, in a passionate admiration for his own handiwork. He was making, here in this God-forsaken solitude, a thing of marvel; what he was making surely justified the means. Joan's laughable simplicity and directness were the same; they were part of her essence; no civilizing could confuse or disturb them; but she changed, her brain grew, it absorbed material, it attempted adventures. Nowadays Joan sometimes argued, and this filled Prosper with delight, so quaint and logical she was and so skillful.

They were reading out under the firs by the green lip of the lake, when Wen Ho led his pack-horse up the trail. He had been gone a month, for Prosper had sent him out of the valley to a distant town for his supplies. He didn't want the little frontier place to prick up its ears. Wen Ho had ridden by a secret trail back over the range; he had not passed even the ranger station on his way. He called out, and, in the midst of a sentence Joan was reading, Prosper started up.

Joan looked at him smiling. "You're as easily turned away from learning as a boy," she began, and faltered when she saw his face. It was turned eagerly toward the climbing horses, toward the pack, and it was sharp and keen with detached interest, an excitement that had nothing, nothing in the world to do with her.

It was the great bundle of Prosper's mail that first brought home to Joan the awareness of an outside world. She knew that Prosper was a traveled and widely experienced man, but she had not fancied him held to this world by human attachments. Concerning the "tall child" she had not put a question and she still believed her to have been Prosper's wife. But when, leaving her place under the tree, she came into the house and found Prosper feverishly slitting open envelope after envelope, with a pile of papers and magazines, ankle-high, beside him on the floor, she stood aghast.

"What a lot of people must have been writing to you, Prosper!"

He did not hear her. He was greedy of eye and fingertips, searching written sheet after sheet. He was flushed along the cheek-bones and a little pale about the lips. Joan stood there, her hands hanging, her head bent, staring up and out at him from under her brows. She looked, in this attitude, rather dangerous.

Prosper sped through his mail, made an odd gesture of desperation, sat still a moment staring, his brilliant, green-gray eyes gone dull and blank, then he gave himself a shuddery shake, pulled a small parcel from under the papers, and held it out to Joan. He smiled.

"Something for you, leopardess," he said—he had told her his first impression of her.

She took the box haughtily and walked with it over to her chair. But he came and kissed her.

"Jealous of my mail? You foolish child. What a girl-thing you are! It doesn't matter, does it, how we train you or leave you untrained, you're all alike, you women, under your skins. Open your box and thank me prettily, and leave matters you don't understand alone. That's the way to talk, isn't it?"

She flushed and smiled rather doubtfully, but, at sight of his gift, she forgot everything else for a moment. It was a collar of topaz and emerald set in heavy silver. She was awe-struck by its beauty, and went, after he had fastened it for her, to stand a long while before the glass looking at it. She wore her yellow dress cut into a V at the neck and the jewels rested beautifully at the base of her long, round throat, faintly brown like her face up to the brow. The yellow and the green brought out all the value of her grave, scarlet lips, the soft, even tints of her skin, the dark lights and shadows of her hair and eyes.

"It's beautiful," she said. "It's wonderful. I love it."

All the time very grave and still, she took it off, put it on its box, and laid it on the mantel. Then she went out of doors.

Prosper hurried to the window and saw her walk out to the garden they had made and begin her work. He was puzzled by her manner, but presently shrugged the problem of her mood away and went back to his mail. That night he finished his novel and got it ready for the publisher.

Again Wen Ho, calm and uncomplaining, was sent out over the hill, and again the idyll was renewed, and Joan wore the collar and was almost as happy as before. Only one night she startled Prosper.

"I asked Pierre," she said slowly, after a silence, in her low-pitched voice, "when he was taking me away home, I asked, 'Where are you going?' and he said to me, 'Don't you savvy the answer to that question, Joan?' And, Prosper, I didn't savvy, so he told me and he looked at me sort of hard and stern, 'We're a-goin' to be married, Joan.'"

Prosper and Joan were sitting before the fire, Joan on the bearskin at his feet, he lounging back, long-legged, smoke-veiled, in one of the lacquered chairs. She had been fingering her collar and she kept on fingering it as she spoke and staring straight into the flames, but, at the last, quoting Pierre's words and tone, her voice and face quivered and she looked at him with eyes of mysterious pain, in them a sort of uncomprehended anguish.

"Why was that, Prosper?" she asked; "I mean, why did he say it that way? And what—what does it stand for, marrying or not—?"

Prosper jerked a little in his chair, then said he blasphemously, "Marriage is the sin against the Holy Ghost. Don't be the conventional woman, Joan. Isn't this beautiful, this life of ours?"

"Yes." But her eyes of uncomprehended pain were still upon him. So he put his hand over them and drew her head against his knee. "Yes, but that other life was—was—before Pierre changed, it was beautiful—"

"Of course. Love is always beautiful. Not even marriage can always spoil it, though it very often does. Well, Joan," he went on flippantly, though the tickle of her lashes against his palm somehow disturbed his flippancy, "I'll go into the subject with you one of these days, when the weather isn't so beautiful. It's really a matter of law, property rights, and so forth; a practice variously conducted in various lands; it's man's most studied insult to woman; it's recommended as the lesser of two evils by a man who despised woman as only an Oriental can despise her, Saint Paul by name; it's a thing civilized women cry for till they get it and then quite bitterly learn to understand; it's a horrible invention which needn't touch your beautiful clean soul, dear. Come out and look at the moon."

"Listen!" They stood side by side at the door. "Some silly bird thinks that is the dawn. Look at me, Joan!"

She lifted obedient eyes.

"There! That's better. Don't get that other look. I can't bear it. I love you."

A moment later they went out into the sweet, silver silence down to the silver lake.

* * * * *

Four months later the name of Prosper Gael began to be on every one's lips, and before every one's eyes; the world, his world, began to clamor for him. Even Wen Ho grumbled at this going out on tremendous journeys after the mail for which Prosper grew more and more greedy and impatient. His novel, "The Canyon," had been accepted, was enormously advertised, had made an extraordinary success. All this he explained to Joan, who tried to rejoice because she saw that it was exquisite delight to Prosper. He was by way of thinking now that his exile, his Wyoming adventure, was to thank for his success, but when a woman, even such a woman as Joan, begins to feel that she has been a useful emotional experience, there begins pain. For Joan pain began and daily it increased. It was suffering for her to watch Prosper reading his letters, forwarded to him from the Western town where his friends and his secretary believed him to be recovering from some nervous illness; to watch him smoking and thinking of himself, his fame, his talents, his future; to watch him scribbling notes, planning another work, to hear his excited talk, now so impersonal, so unrelated to her; to see how his eagerness over her education slackened, faltered, died; to notice that he no longer watched the changeful humors of her beauty nor cared if she wore bronze or blue or yellow; and worst of all, to find him staring at her sometimes with a worried, impatient look which scuttled out of sight like some ugly, many-legged creature when it met her own eyes—painful, of course, yet such an old story. Joan, who had never heard of such experience, did not foresee the inevitable end, and, in so much, she was spared. The extra pain of forfeiting her dignity and self-respect did not touch her, for she made none of those most pitiful, unavailing efforts to hold him, to cling; did not even pretend indifference. She only drew gradually into herself, shrinking from her pain and from him as the cause of it; she only lost her glow of love-happiness, her face seemed dwindled, seemed to contract, and that secret look of a wild animal returned to her gray eyes. She quietly gave up the old regulations of their life; she did not remind him of the study-hours, the music-hours, the hours of wild outdoor play. She read under the firs, alone; she studied faithfully, alone; she climbed and swam, alone—or with his absent-minded, fitful company; she worked in her garden, alone. At night, when he was asleep, she lay with her hand pressed against her heart, staring at the darkness, listening to the night, waiting. Curiously enough, his inevitable returns of passion and interest, the always decreasing flood-mark, each time a line lower, did not deceive her, did not distract her. She never expressed her trouble, even to herself. She did not give it any words. She took her pain without wincing, without complaint, and when he seemed to need her in any little way, in any big way, she gave because she could not help it, because she had promised him largesse, because it was her nature to give. Besides, although she was instinctively waiting, she did not foresee the end.

It was in late October when, somewhere in the pile of Prosper's mail, there lay a small gray envelope. Joan drew his attention to it, calling it a "queer little letter," and he took it up slowly as though his deft and nervous fingers had gone numb. Before he opened it he looked at Joan and, in one sense, it was the last time he ever did look at her; for at that moment his stark spirit looked straight into hers, acknowledged its guilt, and bade her a mute and remorseful farewell.

He read and Joan watched. His face grew pale and bright as though some electric current had been turned into his veins; his eyes, looking up from the writing, but not returning to her, had the look given by some drug which is meant to stupefy, but which taken in an overdose intoxicates. He turned and made for the door, holding the little gray folded paper in his hand. On the threshold he half-faced her without lifting his eyes.

"I have had extraordinary news, Joan. I shall have to go off alone and think things out. I don't know when I shall get back." He went out and shut the door gently.

Joan stood listening. She heard him go along the passage and through the second door. She heard his feet on the mountain trail. Afterwards she went out and stood between the two sentinel firs that had marked the entrance to that snow-tunnel long since disappeared. Now it was a late October day, bright as a bared sword. The flowers of the Indian paint-brush burned like red candle flames everywhere under the firs, the fire-weed blazed, the aspen leaves were laid like little golden tiles against the metallic blue of the sky. The high peak pointed up dizzily and down, down dizzily into the clear emptiness of the lake. This great peak stood there in the glittering stillness of the day. A grouse boomed, but Joan was not startled by the sudden rush of its wings. She felt the sharp weight of that silent mountain in her heart; she might have been buried under it. So she felt it all day while she worked, a desperate, bright day,—hideous in her memory,—and at night she lay waiting. After hours longer than any other hours, the door of her bedroom opened and an oblong of moonlight, as white as paper, fell across the matted floor. Prosper stepped in noiselessly and walked over to her bed. He stood a moment and she heard him swallow.

"You're awake, Joan?"

Her eyes were staring up at him, but she lay still.

"Listen, Joan." He spoke in short sentences, waiting between each for some comment of hers which did not come. "I shall have to go away to-morrow. I shall have to go away for some time. I don't want you to be unhappy. I want you to stay here for a while if you will, for as long as you want to stay. I am leaving you plenty of money. I will write and explain it all very clearly to you. I know that you will understand. Listen." Here he knelt and took her hands, which he found lying cold and stiff under the cover, pressed against her heart. "I have made you happy here in this little house, haven't I, Joan?"

She would not answer even this except by the merest flicker of her eyelids.

"You have trusted me; now, trust me a little longer. My life is very complicated. This beautiful year with you, the year you have given to me, is just a temporary respite from—from all sorts of things. I've taught you a great deal, Joan. I've healed the wound that brute made on your shoulder and in your heart. I've taught you to be beautiful. I've filled your mind with beauty. You are a wonderful woman. You'll live to be grateful to me. Some day you'll tell me so."

Her quiet, curved lips moved. "Are you tellin' me good-bye, Prosper?"

It was impossible to lie to her. He bent his head.

"Yes, Joan."

"Then tell it quick and go out and leave me here to-night."

It was impossible to touch her. She might have been wrapped in white fire. He found that though she had not stirred a finger, his hand had shrunk away from hers. He got to his feet, all the cleverness which all day long he had been weaving like a silk net to catch, to bewilder, to draw away her brain from the anguish of full comprehension, was shriveled. He stood and stared helplessly at her, dumb as a youth. And, obedient, he went out and shut the door, taking the white patch of moonlight with him.

So Joan, having waited, behind an obstinately locked door, for his departure, came out at noon and found herself in the small, gay house alone.

She sat in one of the lacquered chairs and saw after a long while that the Chinaman was looking at her.

Wen Ho, it seemed, had been given instructions. He was to stay and take care of the house and the lady for as long as she wanted it, or him. Afterwards he was to lock up the house and go. He handed her a large and bulky envelope which Joan took and let lie in her lap.

"You can go to-morrow, Wen Ho," she said.

"You no wait for Mr. Gael come back? He say he come back."

"No. I'm not going to wait. I guess"—here Joan twisted her mouth into a smile—"I'm not one of the waiting kind. I'm a-going back to my own ranch now. It won't seem so awful lonesome, perhaps, as I was thinking last spring that it would."

She touched the envelope without looking at it.

"Is this money, Wen Ho?"

"I tink so, lady."

She held it, unopened, out to him.

"I will give it to you, then. I have no need of it."

She stood up.

"I am going out now to climb up this mountain back of the house so's I can see just where I am. I'll come down to-night for dinner and to-morrow after breakfast I'll be going away. You understand?"

"Lady, you mean give me all this money?" babbled the Chinaman.

"Yes," said Joan gravely; "I have no need of it."

She went past him with her swinging step.

She was coming down the mountain-side that evening, very tired, but with the curious, peaceful stillness of heart that comes with an entire acceptance of fate, when she heard the sound of horses' hoofs in the hollow of the canyon. Her heart began to beat to suffocation. She ran to where, standing near a big fir tree, she could look straight down on the trail leading up to Prosper's cabin. Presently the horsemen came in sight—the one that rode first was tall and broad and fair, she could see under his hat-brim his straight nose and firmly modeled chin.

"The sin-buster!" said Joan; then, looking at the other, who rode behind him, she caught at the tree with crooked hands and began to sink slowly to her knees. He was tall and slight, he rode with inimitable grace. As she stared, he took off his sombrero, rested his hand on the saddle-horn, and looked haggardly, eagerly, up the trail toward the house. His face was whiter, thinner, worn by protracted mental pain, but it was the beautiful, living face of Pierre.

Joan shrank back into the shadows of the pines, crouched for a few minutes like a mortally wounded beast, then ran up the mountain-side as though the fire that had once touched her shoulder had eaten its way at last into her heart.

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Book Two THE ESTRAY

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BOOK TWO: The Estray

CHAPTER I

A WILD CAT

The Lazy-Y ranch-house, a one-storied building of logs, was built about three sides of a paved court. In the middle of this court stood a well with a high rustic top, and about this well on a certain brilliant July night, a tall man was strolling with his hands behind his back. It was a night of full moon, sailing high, which poured whiteness into the court, making its cobbles embedded in the earth look like milky bubbles and drawing clear-cut shadows of the well-top and the gables and chimneys of the house. The man slowly circled the court beginning close to the walls and narrowing till he made a loop about the well, and then, reversing, worked in widening orbits as far as the walls again. His wife, looking out at him through one of the windows, thought that, in the moonlight, followed by his own squat, active shadow, he looked like a huge spider weaving a web. This effect was heightened by the fact that he never looked up. He was deep in some plan to which it was impossible for her not to believe that the curious pattern of his walk bore some relation.

From the northern wing of the ranch-house, strongly lighted, came a tumult of sound; music, thumping feet, a man's voice chanting couplets:

"Oh, you walk right through and you turn around and swing the girl that finds you, And you come right back by the same old track and turn the girl behind you."

Some one was directing a quadrille in native fashion. There was much laughter, confusion, and applause. None of this noise disturbed the man. He did not look at the lighted windows. He might really have been a gigantic insect entirely unrelated to the human creatures so noisily near at hand.

A man came round the corner of the house, crossed the square, and, lurching a little, made for the door of the lighted wing. Shortly after his entrance the sound of music and dancing abruptly stopped. This stillness gave the spider pause, but he was about to renew his weaving, when, in the silence, a woman spoke.

"You, Mabel, don't you go home," she said.

She had not spoken loudly, but her voice beat against the walls of the court as though it could have filled the whole moonlight night with dangerous beauty. The listener outside lifted his head with a low, startled exclamation. Suddenly the world was alive with adventure and alarm.

"Mind your own business, you wild cat," answered a man's raucous voice. "She's my wife, which is somethin' that your sort knows nothin' about. Come on, you Mabel. You think that outlaw can keep me from takin' home my wife, you're betting wrong."

Another silence; then the voice again, a little louder, as though the speaker had stepped out into the center of the room.

"Mabel is not a-goin' home with you," it said; and the listener outside threw back his head with the gesture of a man sensitive to music who listens to some ecstatic melody. "She happens to be stoppin' here with us to-night. You say that she's your wife, but that don't mean that she belongs to you, body and soul, Bill Greer—not to you, who don't possess your own body, or soul. Why, you can't keep your feet steady, you can't pull your hand away from mine. You can't hold your tipsy eyes on mine. Do you call that ownin' your own body? And as fer your soul, it's a hell of rage and dirty feelin's that I'd hate to burn my eyes by lookin' closely at."

A deep, short, alarming chorus of laughter interrupted the speech. The speaker evidently had her audience.

"So you don't own anything to-night," went on the extraordinary, deliberate voice; "surely you don't own Mabel. You can't get a claim on her, not thataway. She's her own. She belongs to her own self. When you're fit to take her, why, then come and tell us about it, and if we judge you're a-tellin' us the truth, mebbe we'll let her go. Till then—" a pause which was filled with a rapid shuffling of feet. The door flew open and in its lighted oblong the observer saw a huddled figure behind which rose a woman's black and shapely head. "Till then," repeated the deep-toned, ringing voice, "get out!" And the huddled man came on a staggering run which ended in a backward fall on the cobbles of the court.

The man who watched trod lightly past him and came to the open door. Inside, firelight beat on the golden log walls and salmon-colored timber ceiling; a lamp hanging from a beam threw down a strong, conflicting arc of white light. A dozen brown-faced, booted young men stood about, three musicians were ready to take up their interrupted music, the little fat man who had called out the figures of the quadrille, stood on a barrel, his arms folded across his paunch. A fair-haired girl, her face marred by recent tears, drooped near him. Two of the young men were murmuring reassurances to her; others surrounded a stout, red-faced girl who was laughing and talking loudly. The Jew's eyes wandered till they came to the fireplace. There another woman leaned against the wall.

The music struck up, the dancing began again, the two other girls, quickly provided with partners, began to waltz, the superfluous men stood up together and went at it with gravity and grace. No one asked this woman, who stood at ease, watching the dancers, her hands resting on her hips, her head tilted back against the logs. As he looked at her, the intruder had a queer little thrill of fright. He remembered something he had once seen—a tame panther which was to be used in some moving-picture play. Its confident owner had led it in on a chain and held it negligently in a corner of the room, waiting for his cue. The panther had stood there drowsily, its eyes shifting a little, then, watching people, its inky head had begun to move from side to side. He remembered the way the loose chain jerked. The animal's eyes half-closed, it lowered its head, its upper lip began to draw away from its teeth. All at once it had dropped on its belly. Some one cried out, "Hold your beast!"

This young woman by the fireplace had just that panther-air of perilous quietness. She was very haggard, very thin; she wore her massive, black hair drawn away hideously from brow and temple, and out of this lean, unshaded face a pair of deep eyes looked drowsily, dangerously. Her mouth was straightened into an expression of proud bitterness, her round chin thrust forward; there was a deep, scowling line that rose from the bridge of her straight, short nose almost to the roots of her hair. It cut across a splendidly modeled brow. She was very graceful, if such a bundle of bones might be said to have any grace. Her pose was arresting. There was a tragic force and attraction about her.

The man by the door appraised her carefully between his narrowed lids. He kept in mind the remembered melody of her voice, and, after a few moments, he strolled across the floor and came up to her.

"Will you dance?" he said.

He had a very charming and subtle smile, a very charming and sympathetic look. The woman was startled, color rose into her face. She stared at him.

"I'm not dancing, Mr. Morena," she answered.

"You know my name," smiled Morena; "and I don't know yours. I've been on Mr. Yarnall's ranch for a month. Why haven't I seen you?"

"Fer not lookin', I suppose." She had given him that one startled glance, and now she had turned her eyes back to the dancers and wore a grim, contemptuous air. Her speeches, though they were cut into short, crisp words, were full of music of a sharp, metallic quality different from the tone of her other speech, but quite as beautifully expressive.

"May I smoke?" asked Morena. He was still smiling his charming smile and watching her out of the corners of his eyes.

"I'm not hinderin' you any," said she.

Morena smiled deeper. He took some time making and lighting his cigarette.

"You don't smoke, yourself?" he asked.

"No."

"Nor dance?"

"No."

"Nor behave prettily to polite young men?"

Again the woman looked at him. "You ain't so awful young, are you?"

He laughed aloud.

"I amuse you, don't I? Well, I'm not always so all-fired funny," drawled the creature, lowering her head a little.

"No. I've heard that you're not. You rather run things here, I gather; got the boys 'plumb-scared'?"

"Did Mr. Yarnall tell you that?"

"Yes. I've just in the last few minutes remembered who you are. You're Jane. You cook for the 'outfit,' and Yarnall was telling us the other night how he sent one of the boys out for a cook, the last one, a man, having been beaten up, and how the boy had brought you back behind him on his saddle. He said you'd kept order for him ever since, were better than a foreman. Who was the man you threw out to-night?"

"Perhaps," drawled Jane, "he was just a feller who asked too many questions?"

Again Morena's smile deepened into his cheeks. He gave way, in the Jewish fashion so deceptively suggestive of meekness and timidity, when it is, at its worst, merely pliable insolence, at its best, pliable determination. "You must pardon me, Miss Jane," he said in his murmuring, cultivated voice. "You see I've had a great misfortune. I've never been in your West. I've lived in New York where good manners haven't time or space to flourish. I hadn't the least intention of being impertinent. Do you want me to go?"

He moved as if to leave her, and she did not lift a finger to detain him.

"I'm not carin'. Do as you please," she said with entire indifference.

"Oh," said Morena, looking back at her, "I don't stay where people are 'not carin'.'"

She gave him an extraordinarily intelligent look. "I should say that's the only place you'd be wantin' to stay in at all—where you're not exactly urged to come," she said.

Morena flushed and his lids flickered. He was for an instant absurdly inclined to anger and made two or three steps away. But he came back.

He bowed and spoke as he would have spoken to a great lady, suavely, deferentially.

"Good-night. I wish I could think that you have enjoyed our talk as greatly as I have, Miss Jane. I should very much like to be allowed to repeat it. May I be stupidly personal and tell you that you are very beautiful?" He bowed, gave her an upward look and went out, finding his way cleverly among the dancers.

Outside, in the moonlit court, he stood, threw back his head and laughed, not loudly but consumedly. He was remembering her white face of mute astonishment. She looked almost as if his compliment had given her sharp pain.

Morena went laughing to his room in the opposite wing. He wanted to describe the interview to his wife.