"I delivered your letter in Starlight," he said. "I return your brother's reply."
He had taken the letter from his pocket. He held it forth.
She took it. If memories of Glen started rushingly upon her, they were halted by something she felt in the air, something in the cold, set speech of the man she loved as never she had thought to love a creature of the earth. She made no reply, but stood looking peculiarly upon him, a question written plainly in her glance.
"If there is nothing more," he added, "permit me to wish you good-day." He swept off his hat as he had before, turned promptly on his heel, and departed the scene forthwith.
She tried to cry out, to ask him what it meant, but the thing had come like a blow. It had not been what he had said, so much as the manner of its saying—not so much what she had heard as what her heart had felt. A deluge of ice water, suddenly thrown upon her, could scarcely have chilled or shocked her more than the coldness that had bristled from his being.
Wholly at a loss to understand, she leaned in sudden weakness against the frame of the door, and watched him disappearing. Her smile was gone. In its place a dumb, white look of pain and bewilderment had frozen on her face. Had not that something, akin to anger, which her nature had felt to be emanating from him remained so potently to oppress her, she could almost have thought the thing a joke—some freakish mood of playfulness after all the other moods he had shown. But no such thought was possible. The glitter in his eyes had been unmistakable. Then, what could it mean?
She almost cried, as she stood there and saw him vanish. She had counted so much upon this moment. She had prayed for his coming safely back from the desert. She had so utterly unbound the fetters from her love. Confession of it all had been ready in her heart, her eyes, and on her lips. Reaction smote her a dulling blow. Her whole impulsive nature crept back upon itself, abashed—like something discarded, flung at her feet ingloriously.
"Oh—Van!" she finally cried, in a weak, hurt utterance, and back along the darkening hall she went, her hand with Glen's crushed letter pressed hard upon her breast.
Van, for his part, far more torn than he could have believed possible, proceeded down the street in such a daze as a drunken man might experience, emerging from liquor's false delights to life's cold, merciless facts. The camp was more emptied than he had ever known it since first it was discovered. Only a handful of the reservation stragglers had returned. The darkness would pour them in by hundreds.
Half way down the thoroughfare Van paused to remember what it was his body wanted. It was food. He started again, and was passing the bank when someone called from within.