The summer days became weeks, and farther and farther they carried Ellen on the wings of solitude and loneliness until she seemed to look back years at the self she had hated. And always, when the dark memory impinged upon peace, she fought and fought until she seemed to be fighting hatred itself. Scorn of scorn and hate of hate! Yet even her battles grew to be dreams. For when the inevitable retrospect brought back Jean Isbel and his love and her cowardly falsehood she would shudder a little and put an unconscious hand to her breast and utterly fail in her fight and drift off down to vague and wistful dreams. The clean and healing forest, with its whispering wind and imperious solitude, had come between Ellen and the meaning of the squalid sheep ranch, with its travesty of home, its tragic owner. And it was coming between her two selves, the one that she had been forced to be and the other that she did not know—the thinker, the dreamer, the romancer, the one who lived in fancy the life she loved.
The summer morning dawned that brought Ellen strange tidings. They must have been created in her sleep, and now were realized in the glorious burst of golden sun, in the sweep of creamy clouds across the blue, in the solemn music of the wind in the pines, in the wild screech of the blue jays and the noble bugle of a stag. These heralded the day as no ordinary day. Something was going to happen to her. She divined it. She felt it. And she trembled. Nothing beautiful, hopeful, wonderful could ever happen to Ellen Jorth. She had been born to disaster, to suffer, to be forgotten, and die alone. Yet all nature about her seemed a magnificent rebuke to her morbidness. The same spirit that came out there with the thick, amber light was in her. She lived, and something in her was stronger than mind.
Ellen went to the door of her cabin, where she flung out her arms, driven to embrace this nameless purport of the morning. And a well-known voice broke in upon her rapture.
“Wal, lass, I like to see you happy an’ I hate myself fer comin’. Because I’ve been to Grass Valley fer two days an’ I’ve got news.”
Old John Sprague stood there, with a smile that did not hide a troubled look.
“Oh! Uncle John! You startled me,” exclaimed Ellen, shocked back to reality. And slowly she added: “Grass Valley! News?”
She put out an appealing hand, which Sprague quickly took in his own, as if to reassure her.
“Yes, an’ not bad so far as you Jorths are concerned,” he replied. “The first Jorth-Isbel fight has come off.... Reckon you remember makin’ me promise to tell you if I heerd anythin’. Wal, I didn’t wait fer you to come up.”
“So Ellen heard her voice calmly saying. What was this lying calm when there seemed to be a stone hammer at her heart? The first fight—not so bad for the Jorths! Then it had been bad for the Isbels. A sudden, cold stillness fell upon her senses.
“Let’s sit down—outdoors,” Sprague was saying. “Nice an’ sunny this—mornin’. I declare—I’m out of breath. Not used to walkin’. An’ besides, I left Grass Valley, in the night—an’ I’m tired. But excoose me from hangin’ round thet village last night! There was shore—”