“I am sorry I hurt you, John.  Will that do?”—­her eyes were filling.

“Yes—­but—­”

“But what?”

“Oh, I want you to feel sorry.”

“Don’t say any more,” she returned.  “Let us be friends again.”  She put out her hand, he took it, picked up her fan, laid it on the table, and saying “Thank you!” opened the door towards which she moved and closed it after her.

“And so”—­she kept saying to herself—­“we are to be no more than friends.”  She sat still staring across the hall, trying to read.  She was fast losing control of the woman who was fenced in by social rule and custom, trained to suppress emotion and to be the steady mistress of insurgent passion.  “My God,” she murmured, “I should never have been angry when he bought me, if I had not loved him—­and now it is all over—­perhaps!”

Some readjustment there may have been, for when he reentered the hall an hour later, she was reading.  He said, as she looked up, “I mean to have a long tramp to-morrow.  I shall start early and walk to the mills and on to the ore-beds.  Then I shall return over the hills back of Westways, and bring you, I hope, a few wood-pigeons.  I may be a little late for dinner.”

“But, John, it is quite twelve miles, and you will have to carry a gun—­and your arm—­”

John laughed happy laughter.  “That was so like Aunt Ann!”

“Was it?—­and now you will say ‘yes, yes, you are quite right,’ and walk away and do just as you meant to do, like Uncle Jim.”

“I may, but I will not walk further than Grey Pine.”  The air had cleared—­he had done some good!

“Good-night,” he said, “it is late.”

“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.