y away.
"Roger--you're--breaking me," she cried, gasping for her breath in his
arms, yet without giving up the clasp of her own arms about his neck in
the least; and at that he sensed the brutality of his strength, and held
her off a little, looking into her face.
Pride and happiness and the courage in his heart would have slunk away
could he have seen himself then, as Father John saw him, coming from
the edge of the bush, and as Nada saw him, held there at the end of his
arms. Since the day he had come with Peter to Cragg's Ridge the blade
of a razor had not touched his face, and his beard was like a brush,
and with it his hair unkempt and straggling; and his eyes were red from
sleeplessness and the haunting of that grim despair which had dogged his
footsteps.
But these things Nada did not see. Or, if she did, there must have been
something beautiful about them for her. For it was not a little girl,
but a woman who was standing there before Jolly Roger now--Nada grown
older, very much older it seemed to McKay, and taller, with her hair no
longer rioting free about her, but gathered up in a wonderful way on the
crown of her head. This change McKay discovered as she stood there, and
it swept upon him all in a moment, and with it the prick of something
swift and terrorizing inside him. She was not the little girl of Cragg's
Ridge. She was a WOMAN. In a year had come this miracle of change, and
it frightened him, for such a creature as this that stood before him
now Jed Hawkins would never have dared to curse or beat, and he--Roger
McKay--was afraid to gather her back into his arms again.
And then, even as his fingers slowly drew themselves away from her
shoulders, he saw that which had not changed--the wonder-light in her
eyes, the soul that lay as open to him now as on that other day in
Indian Tom's cabin, when Mrs. Captain Kidd had bustled and squeaked on
the pantry shelf, and Peter had watched them as he lay with his broken
leg in the going down of the sun. And as he hesitated it was Nada
herself who came into his arms, and laid her head on his breast, and
trembled and laughed and cried there, while Father John came up and
patted her shoulder, and smiled happily at McKay, and then went on to
the cabin in the clearing. For a time after that Jolly Roger crushed his
face in Nada's hair, and neither said a word, but there was a strange
throbbing of their hearts together, and after a little Nada reached up a
hand to
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