The Branding Iron

"What are you writin' so hard for, Mr. Gael?" Joan voiced the question

wistfully on the height of a long breath. She drew it from a silence

which seemed to her to have filled this strange, gay house for an

eternity. For the first time full awareness of the present cut a rift

in the troubled cloudiness of her introspection. She had been sitting

in her chair, listless and wan, now staring at the flames, now

following Wen Ho's activities with absent eyes. A storm was swirling

outside. Near the window, Prosper, a figure of keen absorption, bent

over his writing-table, his long, fine hand driving the pencil across

sheet after sheet. He looked like a machine, so regular and rapid was

his work. A sudden sense of isolation came upon Joan. What part had

she in the life of this companion, this keeper of her own life? She

felt a great need of drawing nearer to him, of finding the humanity in

him. At first she fought the impulse, reserve, pride, shyness locking

her down, till at last her nerves gave her such torment that her

fingers knitted into each other and on the outbreathing of a desperate

sigh she spoke.

"What are you writin' so hard for, Mr. Gael?"

At once Prosper's hand laid down its pencil and he turned about in his

chair and gave her a gleaming look and smile. Joan was fairly

startled. It was as if she had touched some mysterious spring and

turned on a dazzling, unexpected light. As a matter of fact, Prosper's

heart had leapt at her wistful and beseeching voice.

He had been biding his time. He had absorbed himself in writing,

content to leave in suspense the training of his enchanted leopardess.

Half-absent glimpses of her desolate beauty as she moved about his

winter-bound house, contemplation of her unself-consciousness as she

companioned his meals, the pleasure he felt in her rapt listening to

his music in the still, frost-held evenings by the fire--these he had

made enough. They quieted his restlessness, soothed the ache of his

heart, filled him with a warm and patient desire, different from any

feeling he had yet experienced. He was amused by her lack of interest

in him. He was not accustomed to such through-gazing from beautiful

eyes, such incurious absence of questioning. She evidently accepted him

as a superior being, a Providence; he was not a man at all, not of the

same clay as Pierre and herself. Prosper had waited understandingly

enough for her first move. When the personal question came, it made a

sort of crash in the expectant silence of his heart.