ve found something
cynical--even sinister--in Mark Telford's clear cut, smoothly chiseled
face, but at the moment when he wheeled slowly and faced these two there
was in it nothing but what was strong, refined and even noble. His eyes,
dark and full, were set deep under well hung brows, and a duskiness in the
flesh round them gave them softness as well as power. Withal there was a
melancholy as striking as it was unusual in him.

In spite of herself Mrs. Detlor felt her heart come romping to her throat,
for, whatever this man was to her now, he once was her lover. She grew hot
to her fingers. As she looked, the air seemed to palpitate round her, and
Mark Telford to be standing in its shining hot surf tall and grand. But,
on the instant, there came into this lens the picture she had seen in
George Hagar's studio that morning. At that moment Mildred Margrave and
Baron were entering at the other end of the long, lonely nave. The girl
stopped all at once and pointed toward Telford as he stood motionless,
uncovered. "See," she said, "how fine, how noble he looks!"

Mrs. Detlor turned for an instant and saw her.

Telford had gazed calmly, seriously, at Mrs. Detlor, wondering at nothing,
possessed by a strange, quieting feeling. There was, for the moment, no
thought of right or wrong, misery or disaster, past or future, only--this
is she! In the wild whistle of arctic winds he had sworn that he would
cease to remember, but her voice ran laughing through them as it did
through the blossoms of the locust trees at Tellavie, and he could not
forget. When the mists rose from the blue lake on a summer plain, the rosy
breath of the sun bearing them up and scattering them like thistledown, he
said that he would think no more of her; but, stooping to drink, he saw
her face in the water, as in the hill spring at Tellavie, and he could not
forget. When he rode swiftly through the long prairie grass, each pulse
afire, a keen, joyful wind playing on him as he tracked the buffalo, he
said he had forgotten, but he felt her riding beside him as she had done
on the wide savannas of the south, and he knew that he could not forget.
When he sat before some lodge in a pleasant village and was waited on by
soft voiced Indian maidens and saw around him the solitary content of the
north, he believed that he had ceased to think; but, as the maidens danced
with slow monotony and grave, unmelodious voices, there came in among them
an airy, sprightly fi