and hear the subdued laughter and lipping of the waters, and he was there—­not a half hour’s walk away—­and he had not come.  There was a full moon.  She could see its silver sheen on the River, on the tremulous poplar leaves, sifting through the pine needles and in opal wings round the far luminous cross of snow on the mountain.  The night hawks and the swallows dipped and darted and cut the air with humming wings; and once the wire gate squeaked to some one entering.  Eleanor sprang up with her heart beating so that she could not speak; but it was only a white hatted youth in light gray flannels asking Calamity at the basement door “when MacDonald would be back.”  Did Eleanor imagine it; or did the citified young person in the gray flannels with the red necktie look up towards her hesitatingly, with the suggestion of an ingratiating smile in the pale blue eyes, a suggestion which she could not define but which somehow infuriated her?  Poor pale anaemic youth!  He was not used to having his waiting smiles met by the blaze of red fury that flashed to her eyes.

“Calamity, if that person wants anything, tell him to go out to the bunkhouse and see the foreman.”

Then, she sank back in her chair both glad and sorry in one breath that Wayland had not been there.  She shut her eyes to drink again of the memories that had sustained her all these weeks; and felt the lift and fall of the note his hand had written, pulsing to the rhythm of her breathing; but the memories failed her.  Memories were for absence; and he was here; and he had not come.  If only he would come now, how she would greet him, holding him unflinchingly to his resolution, of course, and of course; but as a kind of second thought in the back of her head, the under motive beneath all the clamor of light upper notes, she knew to the inmost core of her being that she was wishing he would come now because her father was out and she was alone and could greet him as flesh and spirit, heart and mind, cried out to greet him; to touch him; to spend themselves upon him in a fierce proud abandon of love and gladness; to give and take, and give and take again, till, till—­what?  Was this the way to keep him standing strong to his resolutions?

And shall we blame her?  Does the beautiful thing we call life spring from postulates and rules and mathematics; or from the spirit’s altar fires?  And I confess I never see the thing we call vice but I wonder did it not spring from the burning of the refuse heap, which poor humans have mistaken for altar fires?

She heard her father come in late, slamming the mosquito door behind him, and pass across the dark living room to his own chamber without saying good night.  Once, she thought she saw a white sailor hat through the cottonwood hovering along the road.  Then, as she looked, the white sailor seemed accompanied by a panama; and she crept into her room with fevered hands and heavy heart, snacking the mosquito door