“And you have faith in me?”
“Yes; so much that the sun will darken and bird-song never seem the same if I lose you again, as I thought I had lost you from the ship.”
“Oh, you mean that!”
The words came from her in a strange, tense, little cry, and he seemed to see only her eyes as he looked at her face, pale as the petals of the tundra daises behind her. With the thrill of what he had dared to say tugging at his heart, he wondered why she was so white.
“You mean that,” her lips repeated slowly, “after all that has happened—even after—that part of a letter—which Stampede brought to you last night—”
He was surprised. How had she discovered what he thought was a secret between himself and Stampede? His mind leaped to a conclusion, and she saw it written in his face.
“No, it wasn’t Stampede,” she said. “He didn’t tell me. It—just happened. And after this letter—you still believe in me?”
“I must. I should be unhappy if I did not. And I am—most perversely hoping for happiness. I have told myself that what I saw over John Graham’s signature was a lie.”
“It wasn’t that—quite. But it didn’t refer to you, or to me. It was part of a letter written to Rossland. He sent me some books while I was on the ship, and inadvertently left a page of this letter in one of them as a marker. It was really quite unimportant, when one read the whole of it. The other half of the page is in the toe of the slipper which you did not return to Ellen McCormick. You know that is the conventional thing for a woman to do—to use paper for padding in a soft-toed slipper.”
He wanted to shout; he wanted to throw up his arms and laugh as Tautuk and Amuk Toolik and a score of others had laughed to the beat of the tom-toms last night, not because he was amused, but out of sheer happiness. But Mary Standish’s voice, continuing in its quiet and matter-of-fact way, held him speechless, though she could not fail to see the effect upon him of this simple explanation of the presence of Graham’s letter.