"In a way."
"But she's alive, young man. Remember that's somethin'. Ye've got hope yit; it ain't altogether crushed. Look at me, pardner. Didn't I love the sweetest, fairest lass that ever trod God's earth? But she left me!"
The trapper paused, and an expression of agony came into his face. Grey could find no words; he knew not what to say.
"Yes, she left me," the old man continued, "left me in the bright summer time, forty years ago come next July. She faded like the flowers of the garden. The roses fled her cheeks, the roundness left her face, an' the strength desarted her body. But she loved me to the last, an' her partin' word was to me."
"But surely forty years have healed the wound," Grey responded. "It's been long since then, and many a man would have forgotten."
"Never, young man, never! I kin see her as plain to-day as of old. Out on the hills, an' along the trail, my Nan, my lost Nanette, is always with me."
"And have you lived in the wilderness ever since?" Grey queried.
"Most of the time."
"Don't you often long, though, for civilisation?"