WANDA'S DISCOVERY
A supreme happiness had filled Wanda Leland's heart for a few golden hours, so thoroughly permeating every fibre of her emotional being that when sorrow came afterward it could not entirely drive out the whispering gladness.
Never had the forest land seemed so big, so vast and still as during the slow days which followed. She went to it for the comfort she could not bring herself to ask of her mother just yet, and it mothered her, crooned and whispered and sang to her. Through the dew filled mornings she wandered silently; rarely did she return to the house until the sun was low in the west. Never had this world she loved seemed so vitally close to her, so big in a new sense, so eloquently an expression of the divine eternal. Her heart swelled and the talk of the pine tops entered it.
They were sad, glad days. Gladness sang in her heart when in the sun-flooded mornings she rode out alone, and perhaps her devious way brought her to the spot where Red Reckless had swept her up into his arms for the first time, when his kiss had brought love into full blossom in her breast. Sadness brought its shadow and listlessness when day after day passed and she did not see him again, when the eager hope of the morning that he too would ride to that spot to meet her died down in the afternoon's invariable disappointment. Gladness when she thought of him, just of him; sadness when she thought of her father's stern face.
Red Reckless had made no attempt to see her, or to communicate with her. Even while she sought to find excuses for him, that hurt her more than her loyalty would let her whisper to herself. He would come soon. He would know where to find her, know that her woman's heart was taking her to the spot where that heart had really become a woman's. He was thinking of her now as she thought of him. Her heart heard his heart talking to it across the forests and streams.
A woman's heart trusted him, but a maiden's pride permitted no question when Garth rode over as he did twice during the following week. When Garth remarked casually that his cousin was the same old chap he'd always been, and that he seemed to have nothing in his rollicking brain more serious than the breaking of a wild devil of a colt and a horse race which he had set his heart upon, Wanda bent her head a little over her book and gave no other sign of having heard the statement elicited by her mother's question. But the news hurt, too, just a little. There was a quick sting that came and was gone as her love for him surged up again, and it was the same sort of sting, only stronger, that she had felt as a little girl when she thought of him as happy in his boyish pursuits with any one but her. It did not matter now whether it was Little Saxon or Big Bill. She told herself in her own little room that she was a jealous cat. But—
"Oh, dear God, how I love you, Wayne!"
Then, when the days passed and she did not hear from him, there came for the first time a quick fear which was the first ally of that twinge of jealousy. The fifth day came, the day on which he was riding to Laughter Lake with Ruf Ettinger, and she could not know that his every thought was of her. She only felt that, had she been the man, she would not have stayed away. And there came the question and the fear,
"Does he love me as I love him?"
The old, lovers' question ever since Aucassin and Nicolette; the matter for long debate and reiterated argument: "It may not be that thou shouldst love me even as I love thee!" She found herself blushing hotly as she rode alone through the forest at the thought that she was again going to meet him, and that he did not come to meet her. She felt suddenly ashamed and angry both with him and with herself. Was she, to him, like a ripe apple that had dropped into his hand at the touch? Did he think other—?