“Yes,” said Joan, “yes. I did mean to go away. But—but it’s Pierre.”
He bent and began to strap on her snowshoes. There was a fighting brilliance in his eyes and a strange look of hurry about him that had its effect on Joan. “It’s Pierre no longer,” said he. “What can you do for him? What can he do for you? Be sensible, child. Come. Don’t waste time. There will be snow to-day.”
In fact it was to-day. The moon had set and a gray dawn possessed the world. It was not nearly so cold and the great range had vanished in a bank of gray-black clouds moving steadily northward under a damp wind. Joan looked at this one living creature with wide, fever-brightened eyes.
“Come,” said the man impatiently.
Joan bent her head and followed him across the snow.
CHAPTER VIII
DELIRIUM
It is not the people that have led still and uneventful lives who are best prepared for emergencies. They are not trained to face crises, to make prompt and just decisions. Joan had made but two such resolutions in her life; the first when she had followed Pierre, the second when she had kept Holliwell’s books in defiance of her husband’s jealousy. The leaving her father had been the result of long and painful thought. Now, in a few hours, events had crashed about her so that her whole life, outer and inner, had been shattered. Beyond the pain and fever of her wound there was an utter confusion of her faculties. Before she fainted she had, indeed, made a distinct resolve to leave Pierre. It was this purpose, working subconsciously on her will, as much as the urgent pressure of the stranger, that took her past Pierre’s body out into the dawn and sent her on that rash journey of hers in the footsteps of an unknown man. This being seemed to her then hardly human. Mysteriously he had stepped in out of the night, mysteriously he had condemned Pierre, and in self-defense, for Joan had seen Pierre draw his gun and fire, he had killed her husband. Now, just as mysteriously, as inevitably it seemed to her, he took command of her life. She was a passive, shipwrecked thing—a derelict. She had little thought and no care for her life.