"Never mind what I'm like," suggested the girl; "that doesn't matter. I guess everyone seems a different person with different people; but you wanted to tell me something of yourself, didn't you?"
"That's what I'm trying to get at," he answered, "but it isn't easy. I've got to go back so far to start at the beginning—back ten years, to reckon up mistakes. That's a big job, my girl—my girl."
The lingering repetition of those words opened the girl's eyes wide with a sudden memory of that moonlit night in the gulch. Then she had not fancied those whispered words! they had been uttered, and by his voice; and those fancied tears of Tillie's, and—the kisses!
So thick came those thronging memories, that she did not notice his long, dreamy silence. She was thinking of that night, and all the sweet, vague suggestion in it that had vanished with the new day. She was comparing its brief charm with this meeting of to-night that was ignoring it so effectually; that was as the beginning of a new knowledge of each other, with the commonplace and practical as a basis.
Her reverie was broken sharply by the sight of a form that suddenly, silently, appeared in the door-way. Her first impulse of movement or speech was checked as the faint, flickering light shifted across the visage of the new-comer, and she recognized the Indian girl who had hidden behind the ponies. A smile was on the dark face as she saw Genesee lying there, asleep he must have looked from the door, and utterly oblivious of her entrance. Her soft moccasins left no sound as she crossed the floor and dropped down beside him, laying one arm about his throat. He clasped the hand quickly and opened his half-shut eyes. Did he, for an instant, mistake it for another hand that had slipped into his that one night? Whatever he thought, his face was like that of death as he met the eyes of the Indian girl.
"Talapa!" he muttered, and his fingers closing on her wrist must have twisted it painfully, by the quick change in her half-Indian, half-French face. He seemed hardly conscious of it. Just then he looked at her as if she was in reality that Indian deity of the inferno from whom her name was derived.
"Hyak nika kelapie!" (I returned quickly), she whined, as if puzzled at her reception, and darting furious sidelong glances from the black eyes that had the width between them that is given to serpents. "Nah!" she ejaculated angrily, as no answer was made to her; and freeing her hand, she rose to her feet. She had not once seen the white girl in the shadow. Coming from the darkness into the light, her eyes were blinded to all but the one plainly seen figure. But as she rose to her feet, and Genesee with her, Rachel stooped to the pile of wood beside her, and throwing some bits of pine on the fire, sent the sparks flying upward, and a second later a blaze of light flooded the room.
The action was a natural, self-possessed one—it took a great deal to upset Miss Hardy's equanimity—and she coolly sat down again facing the astonished Indian girl and Genesee; but her face was very white, though she said not a word.
"There is no need for me to try to remember the beginning, is there," said Genesee bitterly, looking at her with sombre, moody eyes, "since the end has told its own story? This is—my—my—"
Did he say wife? She never could be quite sure of the word, but she knew he tried to say it.