Wyllard thrust his hand into his pocket, and took out a little leather case.
“You are by no means a stranger to me,” he remarked as he handed her the photograph. “This is your picture; I found it among the dead lad’s things.”
The girl, who started visibly, flashed a keen glance at him. It was evident that he had not intended to produce any dramatic effect. She flushed a little.
“I never knew he had it,” she asserted. “Perhaps he got it from his sister.” She paused, and then, as if impelled to make the fact quite clear, added, “I certainly never gave it to him.”
Wyllard smiled gravely, for he recognized that while she was clearly grieved to hear of young Radcliffe’s death, she could have had no particular tenderness for the unfortunate lad.
“Well,” he said, “perhaps he took it in the first place for the mere beauty of it, and it afterwards became a companion—something that connected him with the Old Country. It appealed in one of those ways to me.”
Again she flashed a sharp glance at him, but he went on unheeding:
“When I found it I meant to keep it merely as a clew, and so that it could be given up to his relatives some day,” he added. “Then I fell into the habit of looking at it in my lonely camp in the bush at night, and when I sat beside the stove while the snow lay deep upon the prairie. There was something in your eyes that seemed to encourage me.”
“To encourage you?”
“Yes,” Wyllard assented gravely, “I think that expresses it. When I camped in the bush of the Pacific slope we were either out on the gold trail—and we generally came back ragged and unsuccessful after spending several months’ wages which we could badly spare—or I was going from one wooden town to another without a dollar in my pocket and wondering how I was to obtain one when I got there. For a time it wasn’t much more cheerful on the prairie. Twice in succession the harvest failed. Perhaps Lance Radcliffe felt as I did.”