I was silenced.
That night the statement was written in the presence of Captain Grif, Wanza, and Father O’Shan, and it went forward with a letter from me to Haidee.
Wanza and I waited impatiently for a return letter from Haidee. But the days went past like shadows, and no letter came. I had been climbing upward toward the summit of comparative peace, I had almost reached it when Bill Jobson came with his disclosure. But now, hearing nothing from my wonder woman, the valley closed around me. I walked in a stagnant marsh, the atmosphere was that of the lowland.
One night some three weeks after the letter from Haidee should have reached me, I found myself unable to sleep. I arose and dressed, and went outside and walked along the river road toward the village. After going some distance I lay down beneath a tree in a pine grove. It was about two o’clock. A purple darkness lay all around me. The stars were like pale gems, clear and cool and polished. The Milky Way was like a fold of silver gauze. The pines stood up very black and silent in my grove. I began to wonder why I ever slept indoors, when out in the woods I felt as though I were in God’s house, a partaker of his hospitality.
I relished my bed of pine needles extremely. I began to ponder many things, the silence and the stars served to give my thoughts a strange turn, and I recalled what a well-loved writer has said: “To live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free.”
Yes, I said to myself:
“Wandering with the wandering wind,
Vagabond and unconfined.”
Slowly I said over to myself the last verse of the song—the verse I had not given to Wanza:
“Marna of the far quest