The words fell in a sobbing whisper from her, but he had gone too far to hear. Through the window she saw him shake hands with Cummins in front of the company's store. She watched him as he went to the cabin of Iowaka and Jean. Then she saw him shoulder his pack, and, with bowed head, disappear slowly into the depths of the black spruce forest.
CHAPTER XXIII
JAN RETURNS
All that spring and summer Jan spent in the thick caribou swamps and low ridge-mountains along the Barrens. It was two months before he appeared at the post again, and then he remained only long enough to patch himself up and secure fresh supplies.
Mélisse had suffered quietly during these two months, a grief and loneliness filling her heart which none knew but herself. Even from Iowaka she kept her unhappiness a secret; and yet when the gloom had settled heaviest upon her, she was still buoyed up by a persistent hope. Until Jan's last visit to Lac Bain this hope never quite went out.
The first evening after his arrival from the swamps to the west, he came to the cabin. His beard had grown again. His hair was long and shaggy, and fell in shining dishevelment upon his shoulders. The sensitive beauty of his great eyes, once responsive to every passing humor in Mélisse, flashing fun at her laughter, glowing softly in their devotion, was gone. His face was filled with the age-old silence of the forest man. Firmly and yet gently, it repelled whatever of the old things she might have said and done, holding her away from him as if by power of a strong hand.
This time Mélisse knew that there was left not even the last comforting spark of hope within her bosom. Jan had gone out of her life for ever, leaving to her, as a haunting ghost of what they two had once been to each other, the old violin on the cabin wall.
After he went away again, the violin became more and more to her what it had once been to him. She played it as he had played it, sobbing her loneliness and her heart-break through its strings, in lone hours clasping it to her breast and speaking to it as Jan had talked to it in years gone by.
"If you could only tell me—if you only could!" she whispered to it one day, when the autumn was drawing near. "If you could tell me about him, and what I might do—dear old violin!"
Once during the autumn Jan came in for supplies and traps, and his dogs and sledge. He was planning to spend the winter two hundred miles to the west, in the country of the Athabasca. He was at Lac Bain for a week, and during this time a mail-runner came in from Fort Churchill.