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The Border Legion

Page 38

"You--you--" His voice failed in a terrible whisper. ...

In the succeeding days Kells did not often speak. His recovery was

slow--a matter of doubt. Nothing was any plainer than the fact that

if Joan had left him he would not have lived long. She knew it. And

he knew it. When he was awake, and she came to him, a mournful and

beautiful smile lit his eyes. The sight of her apparently hurt him

and uplifted him. But he slept twenty hours out of every day, and

while he slept he did not need Joan.

She came to know the meaning of solitude. There were days when she

did not hear the sound of her own voice. A habit of silence, one of

the significant forces of solitude, had grown upon her. Daily she

thought less and felt more. For hours she did nothing. When she

roused herself, compelled herself to think of these encompassing

peaks of the lonely canon walls, the stately trees, all those

eternally silent and changless features of her solitude, she hated

them with a blind and unreasoning passion. She hated them because

she was losing her love for them, because they were becoming a part

of her, because they were fixed and content and passionless. She

liked to sit in the sun, feel its warmth, see its brightness; and

sometimes she almost forgot to go back to her patient. She fought at

times against an insidious change--a growing older--a going

backward; at other times she drifted through hours that seemed quiet

and golden, in which nothing happened. And by and by when she

realized that the drifting hours were gradually swallowing up the

restless and active hours, then strangely, she remembered Jim Cleve.

Memory of him came to save her. She dreamed of him during the long,

lonely, solemn days, and in the dark, silent climax of unbearable

solitude--the night. She remembered his kisses, forgot her anger and

shame, accepted the sweetness of their meaning, and so in the

interminable hours of her solitude she dreamed herself into love for

him.

Joan kept some record of days, until three weeks or thereabout

passed, and then she lost track of time. It dragged along, yet

looked at as the past, it seemed to have sped swiftly. The change in

her, the growing old, the revelation and responsibility of serf, as

a woman, made this experience appear to have extended over months.

Kells slowly became convalescent and then he had a relapse.

Something happened, the nature of which Joan could not tell, and he

almost died. There were days when his life hung in the balance, when

he could not talk; and then came a perceptible turn for the better.

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