persistence, keeping a
cheerful heart, certain that the intelligence which was frightened from
its home would come back one day. It should be hers to watch for the
great moment, and give the wanderer loving welcome, lest it should hurry
madly away again into the desert, never to return.

She had her reward, yet she wept. She had carried herself before him
with the bright ways of an unvexed girl these twelve years past; she had
earned the salt of her tears. He was dazed still, but, the doublet of
his mind no longer unbraced, he understood what she had been to him, and
how she had tended him in absolute loneliness, her companions the wild
things of the valley--these and God.

He drew her into the workshop, and put his hand upon the bellows and
churned them, so that the fire roared joyously up, and the place was red
with the light. In this light he turned her to him and looked at her.
The look was as that of one who had come back from the dead--that naked,
profound, unconditional gaze which is as deep and honest as the primeval
sense. His eyes fell upon her rich, firm, stately body; it lingered for
a moment on the brown fulness of her hair; then her look was gathered to
his, and they fell into each other's arms.

For long they sat in the solemn silence of their joy, and so awed were
they by the thing which had come to them that they felt no surprise when
a wolf-dog crawled over the lizard on the threshold, and stole along
the wall with shining, bloody eyes to an inner room, and stayed there
munching meat to surfeit and drowsiness, and at last crept out and lay
beside the forge in a thick sleep. These two had lived so much with
the untamed things of nature, the bellows and the fire had been so long
there, and the clang of the anvil was so familiar, that there was a
kinship among them, man and beast, with the woman as ruler.

"Tell me, Samantha," he said at last, "what has happened during these
twelve years, all from the first. Keep nothing back. I am strong now."
He looked around the workshop, then, suddenly, at her, with a strange
pain, and they both turned their heads away for an instant, for the same
thought was on them. Then, presently, she spoke, and answered his shy,
sorrowful thought before all else. "The child is gone," she softly said.

He sat still, but a sob was in his throat. He looked at her with a kind
of fear. He wondered if his madness had cost the life of the child. She
understood. "Did I ever see the