“I suppose they think we’re all ‘Injuns’ out here?”
“Oh no, not so bad as that; but they wouldn’t comprehend anything about you except your muscle. That would catch ’em. They’d worship your splendid health, just as I do. It’s pitiful the way they both try to put on weight. They’re always testing some new food, some new tonic—they’ll do anything except exercise regularly and go to bed at ten o’clock.”
All that he said of his family deepened her dismay. Their interests were so alien to her own.
“I’m afraid to have you go even for a day,” she admitted, with simple honesty, which moved him deeply. “I don’t know what I should do if you went away. I think of nothing but you now.”
Her face was pitiful, and he put his arm about her neck as if she were a child. “You mustn’t do that. You must go on with your life just as if I’d never been. Think of your father’s job—of the forest and the ranch.”
“I can’t do it. I’ve lost interest in the service. I never want to go into the high country again, and I don’t want you to go, either. It’s too savage and cruel.”
“That is only a mood,” he said, confidently. “It is splendid up there. I shall certainly go back some time.”
He could not divine, and she could not tell him, how poignantly she had sensed the menace of the cold and darkness during his illness. For the first time in her life she had realized to the full the unrelenting enmity of the clouds, the wind, the night; and during that interminable ride toward home, when she saw him bending lower and lower over his saddle-bow, her allegiance to the trail, her devotion to the stirrup was broken. His weariness and pain had changed the universe for her. Never again would she look upon the range with the eyes of the care-free girl. The other, the civilized, the domestic, side of her was now dominant. A new desire, a bigger aspiration, had taken possession of her.
Little by little he realized this change in her, and was touched with the wonder of it. He had never had any great self-love either as man or scholar, and the thought of this fine, self-sufficient womanly soul centering all its interests on him was humbling. Each moment his responsibility deepened, and he heard her voice but dimly as she went on.
“Of course we are not rich; but we are not poor, and my mother’s family is one of the oldest in Kentucky.” She uttered this with a touch of her mother’s quiet dignity. “Your father need not despise us.”