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He hurried to her, and she leant against him, saying in a sobbing voice: "George Tressady has been here. I seem to have done him a wrong and his wife. I am not fit to help you, Aldous. I do such rushing, blind, foolish things and all that one hoped and worked for turns to mere selfishness and misery. Whom shall I hurt next? You, perhaps you!" And she clung to him in despair.
Then, noticing Marcella's nursing dress and cloak, he came up to her respectfully. "Did you see it, miss?" "I I tried to separate them," she replied, still speaking with the same difficulty, while she silently motioned to Aldous, who was on the other side of the unconscious and apparently dying woman, to help her with the bandage she was applying. "But he was such a great powerful brute."
It was my crime not hers that she lacked a soul. She would have been my ideal, but I spoiled her. And by spoiling her I sold half a million copies of the book. I did not do it purposely. I would have given her a soul if I could have found one. She went her way." "And you compare me to her?" "Yes," said Aldous deliberately. "You are that Joanne. But you possess what I could not give to her.
The light breeze had died down for a moment, and Aldous heard the old mountaineer's reply as it floated faintly back to him through the forest. Continuing to hold his pistol, he went on, this time more swiftly. MacDonald did not signal again. The moon was climbing rapidly into the sky, and with each passing minute the night was becoming lighter.
On a clear night Aldous felt himself stifled by blinds and curtains, and would often sit late, reading and writing, with a lamp so screened that it threw light upon his book or paper, while not interfering with the full range of his eye over the night-world without.
Not until they were inside, and Peggy Blackton had disappeared with Joanne for a few moments, did Aldous take old Donald MacDonald's note from his pocket. He pulled out the quill, unfolded the bit of paper, and read the few crudely written words the mountain man had sent him. Blackton turned in time to catch the sudden amazement in his face.
"Where is she? Where is Joanne?" demanded Aldous. "Twenty feet behind you, Johnny, gagged an' trussed up nice as a whistle! If they hadn't stopped to do that work you wouldn't ha' seen her ag'in, Johnny s'elp me, God, you wouldn't! They was hikin' for the river. Once they had reached the Frazer, and a boat " He broke off to lead Aldous to a clump of dwarf spruce.
I think your Marcella is beautiful, and as interesting as she is beautiful. There!" Aldous started, then turned a grateful face upon him. "You must get to know her well," he said, but with some constraint. "Of course. I wonder," said Hallin, musing, "whom she has got hold of among the Venturists. Shall you persuade her to come out of that, do you think, Aldous?" "No!" said Raeburn, cheerfully.
And I'm crazy to see that bear you were telling me about," she added. Nothing could have suited Aldous more than this suggestion. He was sure that Quade, following his own and Culver Rann's old methods, had already prepared stories about Joanne, and he not only wanted Quade's friends but all of Tête Jaune as well to see Joanne in the company of Mrs. Paul Blackton and her husband.
I hug myself sometimes now for pure pleasure that some one besides his grandfather and I will know what Aldous is and does. Oh! the people on the estate know; his neighbours are beginning to know; and now that he is going into Parliament, the country will know some day, if work and high intelligence have the power I believe. But I am impatient! In the first place I may say it to you, Miss Boyce!
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