“And you compare me to—­her?”

“Yes,” said Aldous deliberately.  “You are that Joanne.  But you possess what I could not give to her.  Joanne of ‘Fair Play’ was splendid without a soul.  You have what she lacked.  You may not understand, but you have come to perfect what I only partly created.”

The colour had slowly ebbed from Joanne’s face.  There was a mysterious darkness in her eyes.

“If you were not John Aldous I would—­strike you,” she said.  “As it is—­yes—­I want you as a friend.”

She held out her hand.  For a moment he felt its warmth again in his own.  He bowed over it.  Her eyes rested steadily on his blond head, and again she noted the sprinkle of premature gray in his hair.  For a second time she felt almost overwhelmingly the mysterious strength of this man.  Perhaps each took three breaths before John Aldous raised his head.  In that time something wonderful and complete passed between them.  Neither could have told the other what it was.  When their eyes met again, it was in their faces.

“I have planned to have supper in my cabin to-night,” said Aldous, breaking the tension of that first moment.  “Won’t you be my guest, Ladygray?”

“Mrs. Otto——­” she began.

“I will go to her at once and explain that you are going to eat partridges with me,” he interrupted.  “Come—­let me show you into my workshop and home.”

He led her to the cabin and into its one big room.

“You will make yourself at home while I am gone, won’t you?” he invited.  “If it will give you any pleasure you may peel a few potatoes.  I won’t be gone ten minutes.”

Not waiting for any protest she might have, Aldous slipped back through the door and took the path up to the Ottos’.

CHAPTER V

As soon as he had passed from the view of the cabin door Aldous shortened his pace.  He knew that never in his life had he needed to readjust himself more than at the present moment.  A quarter of an hour had seen a complete and miraculous revolution within him.  It was a change so unusual and apparently so impossible that he could not grasp the situation and the fact all at once.  But the truth of it swept over him more and more swiftly as he made his way along the dark, narrow trail that led up to the Miette Plain.  It was something that not only amazed and thrilled him.  First—­as in all things—­he saw the humour of it.  He, John Aldous of all men, had utterly obliterated himself, and for a woman.  He had even gone so far as to offer the sacrifice of his most important work.  Frankly he had told Joanne that she interested him more just now than his book.  Again he repeated to himself that it had not been a surrender—­but an obliteration.  With a pair of lovely eyes looking quietly into him, he had wiped the slate clean of the things he had preached for ten years and the laws he had made for himself.  And as he came in sight of the big Otto tent, he found himself smiling, his breath coming quickly, strange voices singing within him.