"In woman's memory, constancy,—her constancy in youth, say? I am not talking of seasoned timber. I don't deserve to be happy, you see, and I look for no more than my deserts."
If he were mocking her now, only to test her! And if she should answer with a humble, blissful disclaimer? But she answered nothing, disclaimed nothing; suffered his suspicion,—his contempt, perhaps, for she felt that he read her through and through.
A widow is well, and a maid is well; but a maiden widow who trembles and looks down—in God's creation, what is she?
* * * * *
On the north side of the Snake, after climbing out of the cañon at Decker's Ferry, the cross-roads branch as per sign-post: "Thirty miles to Shoshone Falls, one mile to Decker's Ferry. Good road." This last assertion must be true, as we have it on no less authority than that of Decker himself. Nothing is said of the road to Bliss,—not even that there is such a Bliss only sixteen miles away. Being a station on the Oregon Short Line, Bliss can take care of itself.
At these cross-roads, on a bright, windy September morning, our travelers had halted for reasons, the chief of which was to say good-by. They had slept over night at the ferry, parted their baggage in the morning, and now in separate wagons by divergent roads were setting forth on the last stage of their journey.
Daphne had left some necessary of her toilet at the ferry, and the driver of Mr. Withers's team had gone back to ask the people at the ferry-house to find it. This was the cause of their waiting at the cross-roads. Mr. Withers and Daphne were on their devoted way like conscientious tourists, though both were deadly weary, to prostrate themselves before the stupendous beauty of the great lone falls at Shoshone. Thane, with Kinney's team, was prosaically bound down the river to examine and report on a placer-mine. But before his business would be finished Mr. Withers and his niece would have returned by railroad via Bliss to Boise, and have left that city for the East; so this was likely to be a long good-by.
If anything could have come of Mr. Withers's project of a memorial fountain at Pilgrim Station, there might have been a future to the acquaintance, for Thane was to have had charge of the execution of the design; but nature had lightly frustrated that fond, beneficent dream.
Mr. Kinney had offered the practical suggestion that the road should go to the fountain, since the fountain could not come to the road. Its course was a mere accident of the way the first wagon-wheels had gone. The wheels were few now, and with such an inducement might well afford to cross the gulch in a new place lower down. But Mr. Withers would have none of this dislocation of the unities. There was but one place—the dismal hollow itself, the scene of his heart's tragedy—where his acknowledgment to God should stand; his mute "Thy will be done!"
Perhaps the whole conception had lost something of its hold on his mind by contact with such harsh realities as Daphne's disavowals and his own consequent struggle with a father's weakness. He had not in his inmost conscience quite done with that question yet.