Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/86

80 She had laid her cloak on a chair. Now she faced him, not in her old imperious manner, but with a smile including him in some mood too large to be quite personal. She did not offer him her hand. He noticed that; it filled him with wonder, and so did his own vein of strange abeyance. When she had come to him in dreams, he had met her with a passionate will to sweep the past into the dust to pave their future. Now she was here, and they stood apart.

"How you have changed!" he said, irrepressibly.

She smiled at him and took the great chair Gaspard had fashioned out of twisted boughs. It became her like a throne. Latham threw on a log, and brought out the chair's mate from among the shadows. There they sat, man and woman, in the place of man and wife, beside the hearth, but held apart by some strange fiat they must both accept. She stretched her hand out to the blaze, and seemed to fall into the happy ease of home-coming. He knelt and took off her thick, fur-topped overshoes, and while he did it his puzzled mind interrogated itself. There was some vital change in her, like the luxuriance of swift ripening. She was ampler. Her shoulders had a gracious curve, sinking into the sweet hollow that invites the cheek. It was no fancy of his clever eye that found new meanings in her face. The frost-flush on it from the night was settling into a rose-bloom by the fire. Her dark hair had a softer sweep, the grace of a more careless fall. Everything about her suggested a woman who had broken from the mould of habit and was growing, no one could say whither, as the germ of life breaks from a bulb and spreads its rootlets underground.

"How am I changed?" she asked.

Even her voice had rich complexities. It was not the considered note of the woman who spun epigrams, embroidering them with laughter. It was an instrument of another kind.

"You are a different creature." He spoke dispassionately. At the moment she seemed to be some precious book for them to read together: not the volume of his love.

She leaned back in the gnarly chair and put her foot out to the fire.

"I hope I am different," she said, musingly, yet with a clear-cut emphasis. "I have tried to be. I said to myself, a year ago last March, 'If my mind is worth anything, it can take control of my own nature and turn it where it twists, unsnarl it where it fails to fit the pattern.' I said I would do that, and do it quickly. And I have done it."

"You are cleverer than I," he returned, from a bitter humility. "I have not changed."

She smiled at him with a tenderness he might have read, had he been arrogant, as some loyal acquiescence in his former state. It roused in him a wistful questioning. But he could not stay to dwell on his own phases of response. What he chiefly felt was curiosity over her. She was at ease in new endowment, and he longed to understand it: not as something he could share—only a lending out of nature's treasury.

"Tell me," he said, "what changed you so?"

She settled closer in her seat, with the air of devoting herself to a long story; but he forestalled her.

"Winifred," he burst forth, "where did you come from? How did you get here—here?"

The tardiness of his wonder showed how often she had been with him in that very room. The four walls knew the vision of her, no more to be remembered now than heralds, after the complete event. Some little note of fact had touched the bubble of his fancy, and he continued:

"I left you in New York. You appear here at night, like a spirit, m these Canadian woods. Is any one with you?"

"I came alone." Again she laughed, and her mirth had the blended notes from many stories in the background of the one she had to tell.

"Where did you come from?" he asked again.

"I came from over there." She pointed through the window to the light across the lake.

"From the lighthouse?" he asked, not remembering that the name belonged only to the fancies of his solitary life.

"Do you call it that? I do, too, in mind. I keep the light there for you. I live there, dear."