Ann had taken to Arizona whole-heartedly and dressed suitably for the new life she was leading.
"I've come to tell you about him, ma'am," he always said, by way of opening their conversations.
Not once again did he call her by her given name, but, though he was always formal, stiffly polite, never allowing an intimation of personal regard to pass his lips, he could not hide the adoration in his eyes. It came through his dogged resolution to hold it back, for he could not keep his gaze from following her every move, every bend of her neck, change of her lips, lift of her arms and shoulders or free, rhythmic movement as she walked.
Ann saw and read that light and, though something in her kept demanding that she blind herself to its significance, that, if necessary to accomplish this, she refuse to give Bayard gaze for gaze, she could no more have hidden the fact of that evidence of his love from her understanding than she could have stopped the quickening of her pulse when he approached.
Nora saw that light, too. She saw the trouble with it in his face; and the realization of what it all meant was like a stab in the breast. He had ceased entirely to laugh and banter with her as he had done before Ann Lytton came to Yavapai; in other days he had always eaten at the Manzanita House when in town, and his humorous chiding had been one of the things in which the girl found simple delight. Now, he came and went without eating; his words to her were few, almost without exception they were of the other woman and, always, his speech was sober.
Mrs. Weyl returned to Yavapai and with her coming Ann found another outlet for the trouble that she fought vainly to repress. To Bayard she had given the fullest detail of her confidence; through Nora she had found a method of forgetting for short successions of hours. But Bayard was a man, and between them was the peculiar barrier which his love had erected; Nora was not the type to which Ann would go for comfort and there, anyhow, was again a dividing circumstance which could not wholly be overcome. It was the emotional receptiveness of an understanding woman that Ann Lytton needed; she wanted to be mothered, to be pitied, to be assured in the terms of her kind and all that she found in the clergyman's wife.
"Why, the poor child!" that good woman had cried when, on her arrival home, her husband had told her of Ann's presence. "And you say her brother has disappeared?"