United States or Bosnia and Herzegovina ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The urge was upon him to surrender utterly to the weakness of forgetting that Mary Standish was a wife. He had almost fallen a victim to his selfishness and passion in the moment when she stood at Nawadlook's door, telling him that she loved him.
But Mary Standish's voice, continuing in its quiet and matter-of-fact way, held him speechless, though she could not fail to see the effect upon him of this simple explanation of the presence of Graham's letter. "I was in Nawadlook's room when I saw Stampede pick up the wad of paper from the floor," she was saying.
Even now he did not think of her as Mary Graham. But she was Graham's wife. And if he had gone to her in that moment of glorious confession when she had stood at Nawadlook's door, if he had violated her faith when, because of faith, she had laid the world at his feet, he would have fallen to the level of John Graham himself.
From somewhere he had been given the priceless heritage of dreaming pleasantly, and Keok was very real, with her swift smile and mischievous face, and Nawadlook's big, soft eyes were brighter than when he had gone away. He saw Tautuk, gloomy as usual over the heartlessness of Keok.
The smoldering fire remained in his eyes, the immobility of his face unchanged. Only when Alan repeated, in his own words, Mary Standish's confession of love at Nawadlook's door did the fighting lines soften about his comrade's eyes and mouth. Stampede's lips responded with an oddly quizzical smile. "I knew that a long time ago," he said.
Thought of the narrowness of his escape and of the first mad desire to call her back from Nawadlook's room, to hold her in his arms again as he had held her in the cottonwoods, brought a hot fire into his face. Something greater than his own fighting instinct had turned him to the open door of the cabin.
And as Nawadlook's door closed behind her, Alan stumbled out into the sunlight, a great drumming in his heart, and a tumult in his brain that twisted the world about him until for a little it held neither vision nor space nor sound.
We can crawl through it and into the ravine." Her words and the square of light were an inspiration. He had not dreamed that Graham would turn the cabin into a death-hole, and Nawadlook's words filled him with a sudden thrilling hope. The rifle fire was dying away again as he gave voice to his plan in sharp, swift words. He would hold the cabin.
I returned the paper where he had laid it, hid myself in Nawadlook's room, and saw Stampede when he carried it to you. I don't know why I allowed it to be done. I had no reason. Maybe it was just intuition, and maybe it was because just in that hour I so hated myself that I wanted someone to flay me alive, and I thought that what Stampede had found would make you do it. And I deserve it!
It seemed as if she had stopped breathing for a moment at his side, and then, with a little, sobbing cry she drew away from him and stood at the half-opened door of Nawadlook's room, and the glory in her eyes was the glory of his dreams as he had wandered with her hand in hand over the tundras in those days of grief and half-madness when he had thought she was dead.
Word Of The Day