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Updated: June 29, 2025
He modeled his manner upon hers. They sat at the table together, Joan silent, save when he forced her to speak, and entirely untroubled by her silence, Frank Holliwell eating heartily, helping her serve, and talking a great deal. He asked her a great many questions, which she answered with direct simplicity.
But before he left after supper, refusing a bed, though Pierre conquered his dislike sufficiently to urge it, Holliwell had a moment with Joan. It was very touching. He would tell about it afterwards, but, for a long time, he could not bear to remember it. She tried to return his books, coming with her arms full of them and lifting up eyes that were almost tragic with renunciation.
She was rarely self-conscious, but she was usually passive or stolid; now there was a brilliant flush in her face and her large eyes deepened and glowed. "I heerd tell of you, Mr. Holliwell. Fellers come up here to see Pierre once in a while an' one or two of 'em spoke your name.
The devil of disappointment and of thwarted desire that had wived him in this carefully appointed hiding-place stood away a little from him and that wizard imagination of his began to weave. By dusk, he was writing furiously and there was a glow of rapture on his face. Joan waited for Holliwell and, waiting, began inevitably to regain her strength.
Landis," he said, in a crisp voice of an accent and finish strange to the girl "I wonder if you and your husband can put me up for the night. I'm Frank Holliwell. I'm on a round of parish visits, and, as my parish is about sixty miles square, my poor old pony has gone lame.
"I wouldn't be wastin' my time," he jeered. It was the first rift in his courtesy. Holliwell looked up in sharp surprise. He saw a flash of the truth, a little wriggle of the green serpent in Pierre's eyes before they fell. He flushed and glanced at Joan. She stood by the table in the circle of lamplight, looking over the new books, but in her eagerness there was less simplicity.
It was dusk, the wind was blowing, the snow was driving in a scud. I came down to the cabin and dropped below the drift by that northern window, and, the second I looked in, I dropped out of sight. There was a light and a fire. Your husband was lying before the fire on a cot. There was another man there, your Mr. Holliwell; they were talking, Holliwell was dressing Pierre's wound.
"I can't be takin' the time to read them, Mr. Holliwell," she said, that extraordinary, over-expressive voice of hers running an octave of regret; "an' someway Pierre don't like that I should spend my evenin's on them. Seems like he thinks I was settin' myself up to be knowin' more than him." She laughed ruefully. "Me knowin' more'n Pierre! It's laughable.
Joan looked at him in a silence of pure astonishment and that was the end of their real talk. The next time Holliwell came, he brought the books, and, finding Pierre at home, he sat with his host after supper and talked men's talk of the country; of game, of ranching, a little gossip, stories of travel, humorous experiences, and Joan sat in her place, the books in her lap, looking and listening.
An' I'm so awful ignorant, you know so awful much. It scares me, plumb scares me, to think how much you know, more than Mr. Holliwell! Such books an' books an' books! An' writin' too. You see I'd be no help nor company fer you. I'd like to listen to you. I'd listen all day long, but I'd not be understandin'. No more than I understand about that there woman's work idea."
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