That had been an age—a year—ago. The little horse had been bravely doing his work, carrying his inconsequent burdens as they listed, while she had been losing herself in protests. She had begun doing that, it seemed, the first day he brought her there. She wondered if he could remember it. She doubted that; but at least he remembered Ewing and loved him. She clasped the arm more tightly about his neck, and the little horse whinnied, pawing the earth with a small forefoot, and moving his head up and down in a knowing way. To the woman he had the effect of seeking to return her caress, so that in a moment she was sobbing in a sudden weakness of love for him.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE WHITE TIME
THE days went, shortening. She kept to her couch through all but those hours when the sun was high. Then she lay to be warmed in the open while the year died before her. She could not see another year. She must read all her meanings into this one. September went and October waned. The sky was often overcast. They had ceased to talk of her going back. Her brother reminded her cheerfully that he had half expected a long stay for her. She must be patient. She spoke in his own vein of hopefulness, promising patience, and smiled as ever on her pair, who still wandered in that garden, bantering comrades, tasting the fruit of every tree but one.
And one day she knew that all her imaginings about this pair had been vain, caught it in the deepened look of Ewing as he turned from Virginia to herself. It was a thing to bask in—that look—like the fervid sun itself. But it hurt her, too; made it harder to let go of life. Yet always before her was the face of Kitty Teevan with its beseeching eyes: "You have so little time to live, and I must live in his memory always!" And so she put the thing away, letting him think as he must, wincing under his look of pity, and that devouring thing that lurked always back of his pity, and striving for lightness when she talked with him.
"I understand why our land seemed unreal to you," she said to him while they loitered in the blue dusk of the pine woods near the cabin one day. The peaks beyond were misty behind gray clouds that lay sullenly along the horizon. "I understand why you called our land a stage land, for this is unreal to me, painted, theatrical, impossible. I keep hearing the person who's seen the play telling his neighbor what's to come next."
"It's real enough," he answered, looking away from her. "I have a way of telling when a land is real."
"You have?"
"Any land is real where you are. New England or Colorado or Siberia or——"
"There, there!" she soothed him mockingly—"or India's coral strand. That's quite enough. You have learned your geography lesson. What a busy traveler you must have been!"