To this girl he owed his life, and he had repaid the debt by trampling roughshod upon her heart. Bitterly he reproached himself for not seeing how things were going. For not until the day she told him in the clearing had he guessed that she loved him.
And yet now as he looked backward he could remember a hundred little things that ought to have warned him—a word here, a look, a touch of the hand—little things, insignificant in themselves, but in the light of his present understanding, looming large as the danger signals of a well-ordered block system—signals he had blindly disregarded, to the wrecking of a heart. Well, he would make all amends in his power; would look after her as best he could, and in time she would forget.
"They all forget," he muttered aloud with a short, bitter laugh, as the memory of certain staring head-lines flashed through his brain. "I wish to God I could forget—her!"
But the old wound would not heal, and far into the night he sat staring into the fire.
"It's a man's game," he murmured as he spread his blankets, "and I will win out; but why?"
Beyond the fire came the sound of a snapping twig. The man started, staring into the gloom, when suddenly into the soft light of the dying embers stepped Jeanne Lacombie. He stared at her speechless.
There, in the uncertain glow, she stood, a Diana of flesh and blood, whose open hunting-shirt fell away from her rounded throat in soft, fringed folds. Her short skirt of heavy drilling came only to her knees; she wore no stockings, and her tiny feet were incased in heavily beaded moccasins.
And so she stood there in the midnight, smiling down upon the man who gazed speechless from his blanket upon the opposite side of the dying fire; and then she spoke:
"I have come," she said simply.
"Jeanne!" cried the man, "why have you done this thing?"