The tender word slipped from her lips like an unheeded commonplace. She spoke it as wives do who use it every day, forgetting, it is not a name.
He felt himself crimsoning to his hair. It seemed a precious bit of wreckage saved out of old memory.
"You live there? Tell me, Winifred."
Her cheeks took on a ruddier flush, her voice fell upon a deepened tone. Yet she spoke with the mature dignity that became her like an armor of her sex.
"You must let me tell it as I can," she said. "It is difficult. When you went away, I knew at once I must be near you. I had them hire the old hotel. I moved there with a man and two women. I have lived there ever since."
"You wanted"—he stopped when something clutched him by the throat, but his response to that one sentence throbbed hotly in his mind—"you wanted to be near me!"
"There were a great many things I hadn't learned then," she said, with that sweet composure,—"things I learned slowly afterwards. I had made a mistake. All that year we were together was a mistake. I was a tyrant. I wanted you to be on the pinnacle of everything. Fame, money—I wanted you to have it all. I scourged you into the market-place. I should have let you live your life, and, if you would let me, lived it with you."
He put out his hands blindly, but she did not take them. She shook her head and brushed the tears away.
"I must snuff the candle," she said, practically, and went to do it, her figure making gracious movement in the room.
"I feel as if it must be done solemnly," she added, with that tenderness which seemed overflowing, so that there was, he thought in wonder, a little now for everything. "Blessed old Gaspard! He told me it would be burning."
"Gaspard? What do you know about Gaspard?"
"I know him very well," she said, returning to her place. "I trapped him once in the woods, and sat down and talked to him. He understands all kinds of things. I told him I was the man's wife, living apart from him for reasons. If the man fell sick, Faspard was to come for me. He promised."
"You have been here all this time? You have lived here—roughly—it is hard living here in winter weather—"
"You were living so. I had to make my ways fit yours. Besides—when I began to live so—I had to be near you. There was no other way. I had to be." Suddenly she came to her feet. "There are canvases along that wall," she said, in vivid interest. "You have worked hard. Gaspard told me so." She turned the faces of the pictures toward her, one and then another.
"There is no light."
"I can see what they are." Excitement thrilled her tone. She bent toward them exultantly. "It is true. I knew it. The certain stroke! There is your old touch, faithful, sincere, and besides that—Maurice, you've caught the vision of things,—that something which is not the thing itself. Oh, how proud I am!"
He, too, had risen, and now he touched her sleeve. "Let the pictures wait," he said. "Come back here to the fire." Whatever moved his tone awoke in her old memories of him, before love turned to doubt. It shook her. For the first time, her prearranged composure was overthrown. But back in her place, she looked at him serenely.
"Tell me more," he commanded, that new note beating through his voice. "You came here to live. I never knew. I never saw you."
"I nearly saw you. It was over by the mountain that first summer. I was wandering, as I did sometimes, when my fits of homesickness were on me. I met Gaspard. He pointed. 'M'sieu' is there,' he said, 'painting the trees.' If I took three steps, I should see you. I was sick with the need of you. But I turned back."
"You wore homesick. Yet you stayed."
"It was easier to stay. I was not homesick for a place. It was for you."
In spite of all the candor of her speech, something held them still apart. The old appeal was silent, the involuntary call that used to sting his senses to a quickened life and lash his brain to race with hers. It was not that any charm had waned or failed in her. She was not less, but more, than his adoring eyes
