heer her she made him feel like a foolish and
tactless intruder, forcing his way into the place that was hers alone.
He did not know whether she was prompted by a cruel perversity, or held
in an absorption so intense she had no warmth of interest left for
anybody. He tried to explain her conduct, but he could only feel its
effect, wonder if she had grown to dislike him, review the last week in
a search for a cause. In the daytime he hung about the doctor's wagon,
miserably anxious for a word from her. He was grateful if she asked
him to hunt for medicine in the small, wooden chest, or to spread the
blankets to air on the tops of the lupine bushes.

And while she thus relegated him to the outer places where strangers
hovered, a sweetness, so gentle, so caressing, so all pervading that it
made of her a new and lovely creature, marked her manner to the sick
man. There had always been love in her bearing to her father, but this
new tenderness was as though some hidden well of it, sunk deep in the
recesses of her being, had suddenly overflowed. David saw the hardness
of the face she turned toward him transmute into a brooding passion of
affection as she bent over the doctor's bed. The fingers he did not
dare to touch lifted the sick man's hand to her cheek and held it there
while she smiled down at him, her eyes softening with a light that
stirred the lover's soul. The mystery of this feminine complexity awed
him. Would she ever look at him like that? What could he do to make
her? He knew of no other way than by serving her, trying unobtrusively
to lighten her burden, effacing himself, as that seemed to be what she
wanted. And in the night as he lay near the wagon, ready to start at
her call, he thought with exalted hope that some day he might win such
a look for himself.

The doctor was for going on. There was no necessity to stay in camp
because one man happened to wheeze and cough, he said, and anyway, he
could do that just as well when they were moving. So they started out
and crossed the plateau to where the road dropped into the cleft of Ash
Hollow. Here they stopped and held a conference. The doctor was
worse. The interior of the wagon, the sun beating on the canvas roof,
was like a furnace, where he lay sweltering, tossed this way and that
by the jolting wheels. Their dust moved with them, breezes lifting it
and carrying it careening back to them where it mingled with new dust,
hanging dense like a