Joan was left alone.  She did not know whether to interpret his abstraction, his temper, and his action as favorable or not.  Still she hoped and prayed they meant that he had some good in him.  If she could only hide her terror, her abhorrence, her knowledge of him and his motive!  She built up a bright camp-fire.  There was an abundance of wood.  She dreaded the darkness and the night.  Besides, the air was growing chilly.  So, arranging her saddle and blankets near the fire, she composed herself in a comfortable seat to await Kells’s return and developments.  It struck her forcibly that she had lost some of her fear of Kells and she did not know why.  She ought to fear him more every hour—­every minute.  Presently she heard his step brushing the grass and then he emerged out of the gloom.  He had a load of fire-wood on his shoulder.

“Did you get over your grief?” he asked, glancing down upon her.

“Yes,” she replied.

Kells stooped for a red ember, with which he lighted his pipe, and then he seated himself a little back from the fire.  The blaze threw a bright glare over him, and in it he looked neither formidable nor vicious nor ruthless.  He asked her where she was born, and upon receiving an answer he followed that up with another question.  And he kept this up until Joan divined that he was not so much interested in what he apparently wished to learn as he was in her presence, her voice, her personality.  She sensed in him loneliness, hunger for the sound of a voice.  She had heard her uncle speak of the loneliness of lonely camp-fires and how all men working or hiding or lost in the wilderness would see sweet faces in the embers and be haunted by soft voices.  After all, Kells was human.  And she talked as never before in her life, brightly, willingly, eloquently, telling the facts of her eventful youth and girlhood—­the sorrow and the joy and some of the dreams—­up to the time she had come to Camp Hoadley.

“Did you leave any sweethearts over there at Hoadley?” he asked, after a silence.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“A whole campful,” she replied, with a laugh, “but admirers is a better name for them.”

“Then there’s no one fellow?”

“Hardly—­yet.”

“How would you like being kept here in this lonesome place for—­ well, say for ever?”

“I wouldn’t like that,” replied Joan.  “I’d like this—­camping out like this now—­if my folks only knew I am alive and well and safe.  I love lonely, dreamy places.  I’ve dreamed of being in just such a one as this.  It seems so far away here—­so shut in by the walls and the blackness.  So silent and sweet!  I love the stars.  They speak to me.  And the wind in the spruces.  Hear it. ...  Very low, mournful!  That whispers to me—­to-morrow I’d like it here if I had no worry.  I’ve never grown up yet.  I explore and climb trees and hunt for little birds and rabbits—­young things just born, all fuzzy and sweet, frightened, piping or squealing for their mothers.  But I won’t touch one for worlds.  I simply can’t hurt anything.  I can’t spur my horse or beat him.  Oh, I hate pain!”