For the first time she betrayed the struggle she was making against some powerful emotion which she was fighting to repress.  Her face had paled.  She stopped herself with a quick breath, as if knowing that she had already gone too far.

“I guess I understand,” said Aldous.  “For some reason your anxiety is not that you will find him dead, Ladygray, but that you may find him alive.”

“Yes—­yes, that is it.  But you must not urge me farther.  It is a terrible thing to say.  You will think I am not a woman, but a fiend.  And I am your guest.  You have invited me to supper.  And—­the potatoes are ready, and there is no fire!”

She had forced a smile back to her lips.  John Aldous whirled toward the door.

“I will have the partridges in two seconds!” he cried.  “I dropped them when the horses went through the rapids.”

The oppressive and crushing effect of Joanne’s first mention of a husband was gone.  He made no effort to explain or analyze the two sudden changes that swept over him.  He accepted them as facts, and that was all.  Where a few moments before there had been the leaden grip of something that seemed to be physically choking him, there was now again the strange buoyancy with which he had gone to the Otto tent.  He began to whistle as he went to the river’s edge.  He was whistling when he returned, the two birds in his hand.  Joanne was waiting for him in the door.  Again her face was a faintly tinted vision of tranquil loveliness; her eyes were again like the wonderful blue pools over the sunlit mountains.  She smiled as he came up.  He was amazed—­not that she had recovered so completely from the emotional excitement that had racked her, but because she betrayed in no way a sign of grief—­of suspense or of anxiety.  A few minutes ago he had heard her singing.  He could almost believe that her lips might break into song again as she stood there.

From that moment until the sun sank behind the mountains and gray shadows began to creep in where the light had been, there was no other reference to the things that had happened or the things that had been said since Joanne’s arrival.  For the first time in years John Aldous completely forgot his work.  He was lost in Joanne.  With the tremendous reaction that was working out in him she became more and more wonderful to him with each breath that he drew.  He made no effort to control the change that was sweeping through him.  His one effort was to keep it from being too apparent to her.

The way in which Joanne had taken his invitation was as delightful as it was new to him.  She had become both guest and hostess.  With her lovely arms bared halfway to the shoulders she rolled out a batch of biscuits.  “Hot biscuits go so well with marmalade,” she told him.  He built a fire.  Beyond that, and bringing in the water, she gave him to understand that his duties were at an end, and that he could smoke while she prepared the supper.  With the beginning of dusk he closed the cabin door that he might have an excuse for lighting the big hanging lamp a little earlier.  He had imagined how its warm glow would flood down upon the thick soft coils of her shining hair.