e others had done, they floated before his
eyes till sight and feeling grew dim. With a last effort he strove to
eject Kitty from his thoughts, for there was the wife he had won in the
race of life, and he must stand by her, play the game, ride honestly,
even in exile from her, run straight, even with that unopened, bitter,
upbraiding letter in the--

He fell asleep, and soon and slowly and ever so dimly the opal light of
the prairie dawn crept shyly over the landscape. With it came stealing
the figure of a girl towards the group of trees where lay the man of
Lammis on the bed of green boughs which she had renewed for him. She had
followed him from the dark room, where she had waited near him through
the night--near him, to be near him for the last time; alone with him
and the kind, holy night before the morrow came which belonged to the
other woman, who had written to him as she never could have written to
any man in whose arms she ever had lain. And the pity and the tragedy
of it was that he loved his wife--the catfish wife. The sharp, pitiless
instinct of love told her that the stirring in his veins which had come
of late to him, which beat higher, even poignantly, when she was near
him now, was only the reflection of what he felt for his wife. She knew
the unmerciful truth, but it only deepened what she felt for him, yet
what she must put away from herself after to-morrow. Those verses she
wrote--they were to show that she had conquered herself. Yet, but a few
hours after, here she was kneeling outside his door at night, here she
was pursuing him to the place where he slept. The coming of the other
woman--she knew well that she was something to this man of men--had
roused in her all she had felt, had intensified it.

She trembled, but she drew near, accompanied by the heavenly odours of
the freshened herbs and foliage and the cool tenderness of the river
close by. In her white dress and loosened hair she was like some spirit
of a new-born world finding her way to the place she must call home. It
was all so dim, so like clouded silver, the trees and the grass and the
bushes and the night. Noiselessly she stole over the grass and into
the shadows of the trees where he lay. Again and again she paused. What
would she do if he was awake and saw her? She did not know. The moment
must take care of itself. She longed to find him sleeping.

It was so. The hazy light showed his face upward to the skies, his
breast rising an