“I feel as if I had lived a long time since I played with that clay,” she said, wistfully; “so many things have been made different for me.”
Then she arose and walked about the little room restlessly, while the eyes of Harris never left her. Into the other room she had not gone at all, for in it was the dead stranger.
“When do you look for your uncle and Mr. Haydon?” she asked, at last, for the silences were hardest to endure. 298
She would laugh, or argue, or ridicule—do anything rather than sit silent with questioning eyes upon her. She even grew to fancy that Harris must accuse her—he watched her so!
“When do we look for them? Well, I don’t dare let myself decide. I only hope they may have made a start back, and will meet the captain on his way. As to Dan—he had not so very much the start, and they ought to catch up with him, for there were the two Indian canoeists—the two best ones; and when they are racing over the water, with an object, they surely ought to make better time than he. I can’t see that he had any very pressing reason for going at all.”
“He doesn’t talk much about his reasons,” she answered.
“No; that’s a fact,” he agreed, “and less of late than when I knew him first. But he’ll make Akkomi talk, maybe, when he arrives—and I hope you, too.”
“When he arrives!”
She thought the words, but did not say them aloud. She sat long after Max had left her, and thought how many hours must elapse before they discovered that Dan had not followed the other men to the lake works. She felt sure that he was somewhere in the wilderness, avoiding the known paths, alone, and perhaps hating her as the cause of his isolation, because she would not confess what the man was to her, but left him blindly to keep his threat, and kill him when found in her room.
Ah! why not have trusted him with the whole truth? She asked herself the question as she sat there, but the mere thought of it made her face grow hot, and her jaws set defiantly.