“I might think so—­how can one tell?” she sighed.  “But I’m very sure my impulses will never plunge me into anything headlong, as you would have me plunge.  Don’t you see,” she made an impatient gesture, “we’re just like a couple of fledgling birds trying our wings.  And you want to proceed on the assumption that we’re equal to anything, sure of everything.  I know I’m not.  You—­”

She made again that quick, expressive gesture with her hands.  Something about it made Thompson suddenly feel hopeless and forlorn, the airy castles reared overnight out of the stuff of dreams a tumbled heap about him.  He sat down on one of the rude chairs, and turned his face to look out the window, a lump slowly gathering in his throat.

“All right,” he said.  “Good-by.”

If his tone was harsh and curt he could not help that.  It was all he could say and the only possible fashion of saying it.  He wanted to cry aloud his pain, the yearning ache that filled him, and he could not, would not—­no more than he would have whined under pure physical hurt.  But when he heard the faint rustle of her cotton dress and her step outside he put his face on his hands and took his breath with a shuddering sigh.

At that, he was mistaken.  Sophie had not gone.  There was the quick, light pad of her feet on the floor, her soft warm hands closed suddenly about his neck, and he looked up into eyes bright and wet.  Her face dropped to a level with his own.

“I’m so sorry, big man,” she whispered, in a small, choked voice.  “It hurts me too.”

He felt the warm moist touch of her lips on his cheek, the faint exhalation of her breath, and while his arms reached swiftly, instinctively to grasp and hold her close, she was gone.  And this time she did not come back.

CHAPTER XI

A MAN’S JOB FOR A MINISTER

Having thus received a sad jolt through the medium of his affections, Mr. Thompson, like countless numbers of human beings before him, set about gathering himself together.  He did a tremendous lot of thinking about things in general, about himself and Sophie Carr in particular.  Moping in that isolated cabin his mind took on a sort of abnormal activity.  He could not even stop thinking when he wanted to stop.  He would lie awake in the silent darkness long after he should have been asleep, going over his narrow and uneventful existence, the unwelcome and anguished present, the future that was nothing but a series of blank pages which he had yet to turn in God only knew what bitterness and sorrow.  That was the way he gloomily put it to himself.  He had still to learn what an adaptable, resilient organism man is.  This, his first tentative brush with life, with the realities of pain and passion, had left him exceedingly cast down, more than a little inclined to pessimism.

He experienced gusts of unreasoning anger at Sophie Carr, forgetting, as a man wounded in his egotism and disappointed in his first passionate yearning for a mate is likely to forget, that he had brought it on himself, that Sophie had not encouraged him, nor lured him to his undoing, nor given him aught to nourish the illusion that she was his for the asking.