ween his hands. Joan started toward him, but he made a wicked and
repellent gesture. She fled into her room and sat, bewildered, on her
bed.

All at once the question came to her: for whom had the delicate
fabrics been bought, for whom had this suit been made? "It was his
wife and she is dead," thought Joan, and very pitifully she took off
the suit, laid it and the other things away, and sitting by her window
rested her chin in her hands and stared out through the blue pines.
Tears ran down her face because she was so sorry for Prosper's pain.
And again, thought Joan, she had caused it, she who owed him
everything. Yes, she was deeply sorry for Prosper, deeply; her whole
heart was stirred. For the first time she had a longing to comfort him
with her hands.

For all that day Prosper fled the house and went across the country,
now fording a flood of melted snow, now floundering through a drift,
now walking on springy sod, unaware of the soft spring, conscious only
of a sort of fire in his breast. He suffered and he resented his
suffering, and he would have killed his heart if, by so doing, he
could have given it peace. And all day he did not once think of Joan,
but only of the "tall child" for whom the gay canyon refuge had been
built, but who had never set her slim foot upon its threshold. Sunset
found him miles away in the foothills of a low, many-folded range
across the plain. He was dog tired, so that for very exhaustion his
brain had stopped its tormenting work. He lit a fire and sat by it,
huddled in his coat, smoking, dozing, not able really to sleep for
cold and hunger. The bright stars, flung all about the sky, mildly
regarded hum. Coyotes mourned their loneliness and hunger near and
far, and once, in the broken woods above him, a mountain lion gave its
blood-curdling scream. Prosper hated the night and its beautiful
desolation, he hated the God that had made this land. He cursed the
dawn when it came delicately, spreading a green arc of radiance across
the east. And then, as he arose stiffly, stamped out his fire, and
started slowly on his way back, he was conscious of a passionate
homesickness, not for the old life he had lost, but for his cabin, his
bright hearth, his shut-in solitude, his Joan. Very dear and real and
human she was, and her laughter had been sweet. He had shocked it to
silence, he had repulsed her comforting hands. She had been so
innocent of any desire to hurt him. He could not imagine her