Joyce of the North Woods

by Harriet T. Comstock

The rings of smoke curled upward, lost shape and formed a haze of blueness. The heat became intense, and the noises of the summer night magnified. The windows and doors were set wide, Gaston's wood-trained senses were alert even in this abstraction.

"What next?" That was the question. He had just come through a conflict with flying colours. He was flushed with victory, but the after details annoyed him. With the waning enthusiasm of achievement, from his point of vantage of abandonment, he was trying to see beyond this confident hour—see into the plain common days when a sense of self would control him, tempt him, lure, and perhaps, betray him. What then?

The realization of Joyce Birkdale's womanhood a time back had shaken him almost as much as it had the girl herself.

It had all been so peaceful, so elemental and satisfying before: that companionship with the little lonely, aspiring, neglected child. She was so responsive and joyous; so eager to learn, so childishly interested in the fairy tales of another sort of existence that he kept from decay by repeating to her. And then that sudden, upleaping flame in the purple-black eyes. The fierce rush of hot, live blood to the pale face. The grip of those small work-stained hands as they sought dumbly to stay the trembling until he had taken them into his firm control.

Well, confronted by the blinding flash, he had acted the man. That was good. He had not acted thoughtlessly, either. He had sent the quivering little thing away quietly, and with no sense of bitterness, until he had threshed the matter out. And then in the Long Meadow, he had set the girlish feet upon the trail he had blazed out for them during the nights of temptation and days of lonely self-abnegation.

It was a hard, stumbling way he had fixed upon. His heart yearned over the girl even as he urged her on. But Joyce was demanding her woman's rights. Demanding them none the less insistently, because she was unconscious of their nature. He knew, and he must go before her; but there was small choice of way.

When he had held her in his arms out there in the open, he had bidden her farewell with much the same feeling that one has who kisses the unconscious lips of a child, and leaves him to the doubtful issue of a necessary surgical operation.

But the victory over self was his, and Joyce was on Life's table. There was a sort of feverish comfort now in contemplating what might have been. Many a man—and he knew this only too well—would have put up a strong plea for the opposite course.

What was he resigning her to at the best? There was no conceit in the thought that, had he beckoned, Joyce would have leaped into the circle of his love and protection. Not in any low or self-seeking sense would the girl have responded—of that, too, he was aware; but as a lovely blossom caressed by favouring sun and light, forgetting the slime and darkness of its origin, she might have burst into a bloom of beauty.

Yes, beauty! Gaston fiercely thought. Instead—there was honour! His honour and hers, and the benediction of Society—if Society ever penetrated to the North Solitude.