At the stairs she stopped, and leaning against the wall looked at him with wide, hopeless eyes.
“We are cut off from everything. My friend does not need me now; she has gone home,—alone. She is dead!”
Arnold took a long walk upon the hills that night, and smoked a great many cigars in gloomy meditation. He was thinking of two girls, as young men who smoke a great many cigars without counting them often are; he was also thinking of Arizona. He had fully made up his mind to resign, and depart for that problematic region as soon as his place was filled; but an alternative had presented itself to him with a pensive attractiveness,—an alternative unmistakably associated with the fact that the schoolmistress was to remain in her present isolated circumstances. It even had occurred to him that there might be some question of duty involved in his “standing by her,” as he phrased it to himself, “till she got her color back.” There was an unconscious appeal in the last words he had heard her speak which constrained him to do so. He was not in the habit of pitying himself, but had there been another soul to follow this mental readjustment of himself to his mutilated life, it would surely have pitied the eagerness with which he clung to this one shadow of a duty to a fellow-creature. It was the measure of his loneliness.
It was late in November. The rains had begun again with sound and fury; with ranks of clouds forming along the mountain sides, and driven before the sea-winds upward through the gulches; with days of breeze and sunshine, when the fog veil was lightly lifted and blown apart, showing the valley always greener; with days of lowering stillness, when the veil descended and left the mountains alone, like islands of shadow rising from a sea of misty whiteness.
On such a lowering day, Miss Frances stood at the junction of three trails, in front of the door of the blacksmith's shop. She was wrapped in a dark blue cloak, with the hood drawn over her head; the cool dampness had given to her cheeks a clear, pure glow, and her brown eyes looked out with a cheerful light. She was watching the parting of the mist in the valley below; for a wind had sprung up, and now the rift widened, as the windows of heaven might have opened, giving a glimpse of the world to the “Blessed Damozel.” All was dark above and around her; only a single shaft of sunlight pierced the fog, and startled into life a hundred tints of brightness in the valley. She caught the sparkle on the roofs and windows of the town ten miles away; the fields of sunburnt stubble glowed a deep Indian red; the young crops were tenderest emerald; and the line of the distant bay, a steel-blue thread against the horizon.
Arnold was plodding up the lower trail on his gray mare, fetlock deep in mud. He dismounted at the door of the shop, and called to him a small Mexican lad with a cheek of the tint of ripe corn.
“Here, Pedro Segundo! Take this mare up to the camp! Can you catch?” He tossed him a coin. “Bueno!”
“Mucho bueno!” said Pedro the First, looking on approvingly from the door of his shop.
Arnold turned to the schoolmistress, who was smiling from her perch on a pile of wet logs.
“I'm perfectly happy!” she said. “This east wind takes me home. I hear the bluebirds, and smell the salt-marshes and the wood-mosses. I'm not sure but that when the fog lifts we shall see white caps in the valley.”