behind her.  There was the companion bang of a door being hooked below, old Calamity keeping watch as usual and only turning in, when she heard Eleanor going to bed.  Eleanor waited till all was quiet.  Then, she drew the burlap portiere across the mosquito door, and lighted her candle, and began writing,—­writing what?  Was it some dildo of oriental song she had read in Europe; was it the burden of some Indian chant stirring vaguely in her unconscious blood; or was it but the simple love cry of primitive Woman, of that woman who wandered round about the streets of Jerusalem calling her lover?  “My flesh cries out to touch you, my beloved,” she wrote; “my hands are hungry to touch you, and my spirit is hungrier than my hands.  When you were absent, I drank of memories; but now, you are back, the shadow waters have gone; I must have the living.  If I could see you but once, I know this wild longing would lie down and be quiet.”  She stopped writing.  Would it?  Would it lie down and be quiet with just a look?  A look would be a deep drink of living waters, she knew that; but would it, would it lie down and be quiet?  She didn’t intend ever to stop loving him.  As long as she loved him, and stayed where love could grow by what it fed on, would it lie quiet?  Was this keeping him strong to his resolution?

She tore the paper to tiny atoms and burned the scraps bit by bit on her metal paper knife above the candle.  Then, she blew out the candle and drew his soiled field-book leaf from her breast.  She fell asleep with her head on her arm, and her lips pressed to that fool-thing he had signed at the bottom of his note, “Dick (the nth),” whatever that meant.

There was no mistaking it next morning at breakfast.  She felt strung and upset; and her father looked at her strangely; and Matthews was so keen on covering the general embarrassment that he aimed too far in the other direction, rattling off such a fusilade of Western stories that they sounded hollow.  She forgot her own confusion studying the two men.  How stooped her father looked!  He looked, what was it?  Like a man who has waited a long time for something to come, and when it has come, found himself too sad to seize it.  His eyes looked as if he had not slept; and Eleanor now observed that the frontiersman’s sun-burned nose had a suspicious shine at the end.  If she had not been undone from her own bad night, she would have helped their efforts to cover embarrassment; but now a horrible thought came; a thought born of the low innuendo in the scandal story; and the thought finished her.  She felt her self-control going and rose and fled round the end of the table to her room.  The old frontiersman stopped mid-way in his story of the brats of Blackfoot boys stealing every stitch of his clothing one day he was bathing in Lower Saskatchewan.  Her father jumped to his feet and threw out one arm to stop her.  That finished Eleanor.  He had never done such a thing before.  The only time he had ever shown affection was that night when she had read the scandal in the paper and he had reached up his hand and taken hers.  Now, he held her in his arms, bowed, broken, unspeaking.  The tears came in a rain.  She did not hide her face after the manner of tenderly nurtured shrinking women.  She faced him with wide open lashes and brimming eyes and burning defiance.