"Don't go too far, John. I shall read a while. This book is really so interesting. We will talk about it."
"Good-night, once more."
The woman he left in the hall laid her book aside. Her unreasonable vexation had gone, defeated by the quiet statement of his simply confessed unhappiness. She looked about the hall and recalled their youth and the love of which she still felt sure. The manliness of his ways appealed to her sense of the value of character. Why she had been so coldly difficult of approach she did not know. What woman can define that defensive instinct? "He shall ask me again, and I—ah, Heaven!—I love him." A wild passionate longing shook her as she rose to her feet.
At early morning John wandered away through the woods feeling the joyful relief from the hot air of cities. After his visit to the mills and the iron-mines, he struck across a somewhat unfamiliar country, found few birds, and the blackened ravage of an old forest fire. He returned to the well-known river-bank below the garden and the pines, and instead of going to Grey Pine as he had meant to do went on as far as the cabin, failing to get any more birds. He had walked some fourteen miles, and was reminded by a distinct sense of fatigue that the body had not yet regained its former vigour.
It was about five of the warm September day when he came to the old log-house. Smiling as he recalled the memories of his childhood, he went into the cabin and found its shelter pleasant and the cooling air of evening grateful. He took off his game bag, laid it on the floor, set his gun against the wall, and glad of a rest sat down. Having enjoyed his first smoke of the day, he let his head drop on the floor, and by no means intending it fell asleep.
Leila too was in a happier mood, and sure of not meeting John set out to walk through the forest. After a pleasant loitering stroll she stopped at the cabin door, and as she glanced in saw John Penhallow asleep. She leaned against the door post and considered the motionless sleeper in the shadows of the closing day. She was alone with him—alone as never before. He would neither question nor make answer. Strange thoughts came into her mind, disturbing, novel. How could he sleep without a pillow? It must be an army habit after tent-less nights of exhaustion in the deadly trenches. People—men—had tried to kill this living silent thing before her; and he too—he too had wanted to kill. She wondered at that as with the motion of a will-less automaton she drew nearer step by step. Her feet unwatched struck the half-filled game-bag. She stumbled, caught her breath, and had a moment of fear as she hung the bag on the wooden hook upon which as a child she used to hang her sun-bonnet.
Then again some natural yearning moved her, and unresisting as in a dream she drew still nearer—merely a woman in an unguarded moment once again under the control of a great passion which knew no social rule of conduct nor the maiden modesties of a serenely dutiful life. At each approach, she stood still, unashamed, innocent of guile, thrilling with emotion which before in quiet hours had been felt as no more disturbing than the wandering little breezes which scarcely stir the leafage of the young spring. She stood still until she won bodily mastery of this stormy influence with its faintly conveyed sense of maiden terror. Her thoughts wandered as she looked down on the sleeper. In voiceless self-whispered speech she said, "Ah me! he used to be so vexed when I said he was too young to ask me—a woman—to marry him. How young he looks now!" The wounded arm forever crippled lay across his breast. She caught her breath. "I wonder," she thought, "if we get younger in sleep—and then age in the daytime. Good Heavens! he is smiling like a baby. Oh! but I should like to know what he is thinking of." There was unresisted fascination in the little drama of passionate love so long repressed.
She knelt beside him, saw the one great beauty of the hardy bronzed face, the mouth now relaxed, with the perfect lip lines of a young Antinous. She bent over him intent, reading his face as a child reads some forbidden book, reading it feature by feature as a woman reads for the first time with understanding a passionate love-poem. Ah, if he would but open his eyes and then sleep again and never know. He moved, and she drew back ready for flight, shy and startled. And now he was quiet. "I must—I must," she murmured. "His lips? Ah! would they forgive?—and—if, if he wakens, I shall die of shame. Oh, naughty love of mine that was so cruel yesterday, I forgive you!" What would he do—must he do—if he wakened? The risk, the urgent passion of appealing love, gave her approach the quality of a sacred ceremonial. She bent lower, not breathing, fearful, helpless, and dropt on his forehead a kiss, light as the touch a honey-seeking butterfly leaves on an unstirred flower. He moved a little; she rose in alarm and backed to the door. "Oh! why did I?" she said to herself, reproachful for a moment's delicious weakness. She looked back at the motionless sleeper, as she stood in the doorway. "Why did I?—but then he does look so young—and innocent."
Once more in the world of custom, she fled through the forest shadows, and far away sank down panting. She caught up the tumbled downfall of hair, and suddenly another Leila, laughed as she remembered that he would miss the game-bag he had set at his side. How puzzled he would be when he missed it. Amused delight in his wondering search captured her. She saw again the beauty of his mouth and the face above it as she recalled what her Aunt Margaret Grey had mischievously said to her, a girl, of James Penhallow. "He has the one Penhallow beauty—the mouth, but then he has that monumental Penhallow nose—it might be in the way." She had not understood, but now she did, and again laughing went away homeward, not at all unhappy or repentant, for who would ever know, and love is a priest who gives absolution easily.