"It was to have been the last of the trilogy. But it won't be now, Ladygray. I've changed my mind."
"But it is so nearly finished, you say?"
"I would have completed it this week. I was rushing it to an end at fever heat when—you came."
He saw the troubled look in her eyes, and hastened to add:
"Let us not talk about that manuscript, Ladygray. Some day I will let you read it, and then you will understand why your coming has not hurt it. At first I was unreasonably disturbed because I thought that I must finish it within a week from to-day. I start out on a new adventure then—a strange adventure, into the North."
"That means—the wild country?" she asked. "Up there in the North—there are no people?"
"An occasional Indian, perhaps a prospector now and then," he said. "Last year I travelled a hundred and twenty-seven days without seeing a human face except that of my Cree companion."
She had leaned a little over the table, and was looking at him intently, her eyes shining.
"That is why I have understood you, and read between the printed lines in your books," she said. "If I had been a man, I would have been a great deal like you. I love those things—loneliness, emptiness, the great spaces where you hear only the whisperings of the winds and the fall of no other feet but your own. Oh, I should have been a man! It was born in me. It was a part of me. And I loved it—loved it."
A poignant grief had shot into her eyes. Her voice broke almost in a sob. Amazed, he looked at her in silence across the table.