She took up her life where she had left it the day Mr. Pinchook had taken her away. Her beautiful horse had been kept for her, as if everybody had expected her to come back, and it welcomed her as if he had been parted from her for only a few days. She strolled about the camp, sat on the edge of the claims, rode up the valley and over the hills with Varley or some of the boys, and took her share in the household duties in the hut, just as of old.
In the wonderful air, so thin and light and permeated with the brilliant sunshine, the strength which she had lost came back to her; her hands began to brown, the freckles to return to the clear ivory of her face. She had been very thin and worn-looking when she arrived; but she gained flesh with her strength, and the old suppleness, which, for want of a better name, we call grace.
Now and again something of the old brightness shone in her eyes, as she laughed at some jest of Taffy’s or some wild, eccentric prank of the boys; but the brightness was only transient, and the laugh came but seldom, for on her face and in her eyes there dwelt an expression hard to define—Eve’s may have worn it when she was turned out of paradise.
She liked to take long rides across the hills in the soft light of the evening with Varley by her side. Often they rode in silence, and Varley, glancing now and again at her face, would see, by the pensive and far-away look in her eyes, that she was dwelling upon that past of which he knew so little. She would pull up on the brow of a hill, and letting her reins hang loosely on the horse’s neck, lean forward and gaze at the magnificent view. But it was not the wide-stretching Australian valley that she saw, but the trim-kept lawns of Belfayre, the English sea that rolled at the bottom of the cliffs, the plantation through which she and Trafford had so often wandered hand in hand; and as the mental vision passed before her, a great pain would fill her heart, a terrible wistfulness take possession of her, and she would fain stretch out her arms to where England and Trafford were and cry aloud.
And Varley, as he watched her, would set his teeth hard and want to cry aloud, too, but with a very different feeling. His heart overran with hate for the man who had taken this beautiful child-woman and broken her heart. Once, as they thus rode, he said to her:
“You don’t want to go back, Esmeralda?”
She started, as if she had forgotten his presence, and the color rose to her face, then it went again, and left her pale, and with something like tears in her eyes.
“No,” she said; “I could never go back, Varley. All that is past and done with. There would be no one to go back to but Lady Wyndover and Lilias, and they—they will soon forget me. In the world over there the people do not remember many days; they are all so busy with their pleasures that they haven’t time to remember. It is each for himself, and in the rush and tear the best of friends are soon forgotten.”
“Would to God you had never gone there,” he said.
“Ah!” She drew a long breath. “At any rate, I have learned to value true love and friendship, Varley. I think they are only to be found in Three Star.”