“Just a moment,” he said, withholding it. “You must read it here and now. I want to take it away with me. I must ask your promise in this matter.”
“Why?”
“You will learn that later, too. Will you promise?”
For a minute, the girl struggled, and then love won. Better to read the bitter parting message and lose it than not see it at all.
“Yes, I promise,” she said, quietly; and he immediately put the envelope in her hands.
Her trembling fingers picked at the flap as she turned away.
“You will pardon me?” she announced rather than asked, turning her back upon him. No living being must see her expression as these last words met her eye.
“Certainly.”
With seeming nonchalance, Seguis filled his pipe from a skin tobacco-pouch, and began to smoke. The men gathering up scattered stores at the edge of the woods below moved slowly and painfully because of their wounds, he noticed. A snow-bunting chirped from a drift near by, and faintly to his ears from the deeper woods came the chattering scold of a whiskey-jack, or jay. He noticed these things during the first few whiffs. Then, he looked once again at Jean. Her back was still turned, but presently she faced him slowly, her cheeks flushed, and her blue eyes starry bright, though wet. He appeared unconscious of her emotion, a thing for which she mentally thanked him. In fact, she found him less offensive every moment. He was different from any half-breed she had ever known, but he was only less offensive than others. He could never be anything better.
“Now, tell me why you want this letter back?” she asked, clinging to it desperately, as though it were her lover's hand.