“Where have you come from?” he asked, as the meal drew to a close.
“From Wind River and under Elk Mountain,” the woman answered with a look of relief. Her face was of those who no longer can bear the soul’s secrets.
There was silence while the breakfast things were cleared away, and the window was thrown wide to the full morning sun. It broke through the branches of pine and cedar and juniper; it made translucent the leaves of the maples; it shimmered on Fleda’s brown hair as she pulled a rose from the bush at the window, and gave it to the forlorn creature in the grey “linsey-woolsey” dress and the loose blue flannel jacket, whose skin was coarsened by outdoor life, but who had something of real beauty in the intense blue of her eyes. She had been a very comely figure in her best days, for her waist was small, her bosom gently and firmly rounded, and her hands were finer than those of most who live and work much in the open air.
“You said there was something you wished to tell me,” said Fleda, at last.
The woman gazed slowly round at the three, as though with puzzled appeal. There was the look of the Outlander in her face; of one who had been exiled from familiar things and places. In manner she was like a child. Her glance wandered over the faces of the two women, then her eyes met those of the Ry, and stayed there.
“I am old and I have seen many sorrows,” said Gabriel Druse, divining what was in her mind. “I will try to understand.”
“I have known all the bitterness of life,” interposed the low, soft voice of Madame Bulteel.
“All ears are the same here,” Fleda added, looking the woman in the eyes.
“I will tell everything,” was the instant reply. Her fingers twined and untwined in her lap with a nervousness shown by neither face nor body. Her face was almost apathetic in its despair, but her body had an upright courage.
She sighed heavily and began.