It was a moment before Tautuk looked at him, and in the herdsman’s eyes was a wild, mute question, as if suddenly there had leaped into his stolid mind a suspicion which had never come to him before. Alan laid a reassuring hand upon his arm.
“I don’t mean she’s going to, Tautuk,” he laughed. “She loves you. I know it. Only you are so stupid, and so slow, and so hopeless as a lover that she is punishing you while she has the right—before she marries you. But if she should marry someone else, what would you do?”
“My brother?” asked Tautuk.
“No.”
“A relative?”
“No.”
“A friend?”
“No. A stranger. Someone who had injured you, for instance; someone Keok hated, and who had cheated her into marrying him.”
“I would kill him,” said Tautuk quietly.
It was this night the temptation was strongest upon Alan. Why should Mary Standish go back, he asked himself. She had surrendered everything to escape from the horror down there. She had given up fortune and friends. She had scattered convention to the four winds, had gambled her life in the hazard, and in the end had come to him! Why should he not keep her? John Graham and the world believed she was dead. And he was master here. If—some day—Graham should happen to cross his path, he would settle the matter in Tautuk’s way. Later, while Tautuk slept, and the world lay about him in a soft glow, and the valley below was filled with misty billows of twilight out of which came to him faintly the curious, crackling sound of reindeer hoofs and the grunting contentment of the feeding herd, the reaction came, as he had known it would come in the end.