Her mother wrote to her about once a week, brief, ill-spelled letters, always with an ardent inclosure from Hanson, and Pearl would lie out on the hillside during the long summer days reading, and re-reading them, and at night she slept with them next her heart.  For the first few months Hanson was content to write to her and to extract what comfort he could from her notes to her mother.  These he invested with cryptic and hidden meanings endeavoring to find a veiled message for himself in every line.  But presently, growing impatient, he began to beg her for a word, only a word, but sent directly from her to him; yet, although the summer had waned to autumn, she remained obdurate, her will and her pride still stronger than her love.

Sometimes in the evening Hugh would beg her to dance, but she always refused.  The desire for that spontaneous and natural form of expression was gone from her; and once when Hugh had persisted in urging her, she had left the room, nor appeared again all evening, so that it became a custom not to mention her dancing to her.

“Gosh a’mighty!” cried Mrs. Nitschkan robustly, looking up from a book of flies over which she had been poring, “think of getting a man on the brain like that.”

Jose, who had been putting away the supper dishes, assisted by Mrs. Thomas, who had regarded the opportunity as propitious for certain elephantine coquetries, stopped to regard the gypsy with that peering mixture of amusement and curiosity which she ever evoked in him.

“But, Nitschkan,” he asked, “were you never crazy about a man?”

“Marthy Thomas knows more about such goin’s on than me,” she returned equably; “but since you ask me, I was crazy once about Jack, and another awful pretty girl had him.  But that wasn’t all.”  She slapped her knee in joyous and triumphant remembrance, and the cabin echoed with her laughter.

“Ah!” Jose hastily put away his last dish and sat cross-legged on the hearth at her feet, looking up into her face with impish interest.  “How did you manage him or her?”

“You can’t manage a her no more’n you can manage a cat,” bluntly.  “You can’t make a cat useful, and you can’t make it mind; but,” significantly, “you can manage a dog and train him, too.  I had to learn that girl that’d corraled Jack that a pretty face and ruffled petticoats may catch a man, but they can’t always hold him.”

“What can hold ’em?” interrupted Mrs. Thomas, sighing heavily.  “Not always vittles, and cert’ny not a loving heart.”

Mrs. Nitschkan snapped her book impatiently.  “Now, Marthy, don’t you stir me up with that talk of yours, like men was the only prize packages in life.  I can’t see what these home-body women love to fool ’emselves so for.  You’re just like my Celora, Marthy.  ‘Mommie,’ she says to me once, ’I wonder when the right man’ll come along and learn me to love him?’ Well, I happened to be makin’ a dog whip jus’ when she spoke, and I says, ’Celora, if you give me much of that talk I’ll give you a hidin’, big as you are.  You got your man all picked out right now, and you mean to marry him whether he thinks so or not, and he can’t get away from you no more’n a cat can from a mouse.’”