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314 She had no right to be glad. She should have been angry, for he flung his words at her, challenging her to love him the less for all his misdeeds and his failures and his selfishness. And instead she laughed a little; knowing that she could not, and knowing, too, the glory of that renunciaition [sic] which forbade them ever to tell each other these things face to face.

That night, kneeling by her mother's bed in the dark, Jennifer spoke of her desire to go back to Grey Wolf. She could not tell the reason. But she knew that the duty which Dick owed to Grange's Andree and which Tempest, without laying undue stress, had clearly lined, was hers to discharge. How deep that obligation might be she did not know. Why she resented it so little she did not know. But she did know that little lonely Grey Wolf by the faraway northern river called her as no other place on earth had ever called her. Of all this she said nothing to her mother, but there was much understood between the two which even the tenderest love must leave unsaid. The elder woman laid her widowed hand on the young hand which was so infinitely worse than widowed.

"This may be too hard for you, Jennifer," she said. "And for more than you. Have you thought of that?"

"Yes, dear. But I must go. Over there I shall hear—little things. And I can't do without them. They are all that is left in my life."

The mother was silent. She had neither right nor power to venture here. It was beyond her control, beyond her understanding. Her daughter had won her way down strange paths where neither love nor guarding could hedge her in. But one thing she knew, and she spoke it.

"If you do go I will go with you, Jennifer."

"Oh, mother of mine, would you? Truly, would you? But you might get your dear aristocratic nose frost-bitten in the winter. And there are so few of the comforts you're accustomed to."

"You are the principal comfort which I'm accustomed to. I can do without the other things, but not without you, darling."

Jennifer put her lips to the fine old face.

"I don't want to be selfish," she said. "But I shall