“I went to Egypt, and then to India.  A year later I learned that Mortimer FitzHugh had gone to America, and I returned to London.  For two years I heard nothing of him; but day and night I lived in fear and dread.  And then came the news that he had died, as you read in the newspaper clipping.  I was free!  For a year I believed that; and then, like a shock that had come to destroy me, I was told that he was not dead but that he was alive, and in a place called Tete Jaune Cache, in British Columbia.  I could not live in the terrible suspense that followed.  I determined to find out for myself if he was alive or dead.  And so I came, John Aldous.  And he is dead.  He is down there—­dead.  And I am glad that he is dead!”

“And if he was not dead,” said Aldous quietly, “I would kill him!”

He could find nothing more to say than that.  He dared trust himself no further, and in silence he held out his hands, and for a moment Joanne gave him her own.  Then she withdrew them, and with a little gesture, and the smile which he loved to see trembling about her mouth, she said: 

“Donald will think this is scandalous.  We must go back and apologize!”

She led him down the slope, and her face was filled with the pink flush of a wild rose when she ran up to Donald, and asked him to help her into her saddle.  John Aldous rode like one in a dream as they went back into the valley, for with each minute that passed Joanne seemed more and more to him like a beautiful bird that had escaped from its prison-cage, and in him mind and soul were absorbed in the wonder of it and in his own rejoicing.  She was free, and in her freedom she was happy!

Free!  It was that thought that pounded steadily in his brain.  He forgot Quade, and Culver Rann, and the gold; he forgot his own danger, his own work, almost his own existence.  Of a sudden the world had become infinitesimally small for him, and all he could see was the soft shimmer of Joanne’s hair in the sun, the wonder of her face, the marvellous blue of her eyes—­and all he could hear was the sweet thrill of her voice when she spoke to him or old Donald, and when, now and then, soft laughter trembled on her lips in the sheer joy of the life that had dawned anew for her this day.

They stopped for dinner, and then went on over the range and down into the valley where lay Tete Jaune.  And all this time he fought to keep from flaming in his own face the desire that was like a hot fire within him—­the desire to go to Joanne and tell her that he loved her as he had never dreamed it possible for love to exist in the whole wide world.  He knew that to surrender to that desire in this hour would be something like sacrilege.  He did not guess that Joanne saw his struggle, that even old MacDonald mumbled low words in his beard.  When they came at last to Blackton’s bungalow he thought that he had kept this thing from her, and he did not see—­and would not have understood if he had seen—­the wonderful and mysterious glow in Joanne’s eyes when she kissed Peggy Blackton.