the moment of his
supreme idiocy. Or flatter yourself with the vanity of it. Are you a
good woman or a bad? I don't know. Are you generous or mean? I don't
know. Are you loyal and stanch and true--or treacherous and
contemptible? I don't know. I don't know a thing about you, and yet I
let you slip into my life one day and the next rile up all of the mud
which was settling to the bottom. Go and brag of it to your two
hangdogs. But, by heaven," and his fist smashed down into an open
palm, "you and your dogs keep out of my way. If the three of you are
here another twenty-four hours I'll drive them out and with them any
other man you so much as look at!"

He stared at her for a moment, grown suddenly silent and white faced.
He lifted his arms as though he would sweep her up into them. Then he
dropped them so that they fell to his side like dead weights and swung
about, turning his back upon her, going swiftly upstream toward the
Settlement.

Across the river came the call of a robin. A splash of blue fire in
the willows was a blue bird's wing. A solitary butterfly made a half
circle about him, passing close to him as though to beat him back with
its delicate, diaphanous wings. The pale yellowish buds everywhere
were changing to a lusty verdant. Air and grass were filled with
questing insect life thrilling upward with little voices. The snows
were slipping, slipping from the mountainsides, the waters rising in
river and lake. The sap was astir in shrub and tree, bursting upward
joyously. Nature had breathed her soft command to all of the North
Woods; every creature and thing of life in the North Woods had heard
the call.

CHAPTER XII

MERE BRUTE . . . OR JUST PLAIN MAN?

Ygerne, sitting very still, watched Drennen until he had passed around
a bend in the river and was lost to her sight behind a clump of
willows. His impassioned outburst had been too frenzied not to have
moved her powerfully. But the expression in the eyes which followed
him was too complex to give any key to the one emotion standing above
the others in her breast. When she could see him no longer she rose
and followed slowly.

Because the course of the Little MacLeod is full of twists and kinks,
spine of ridge and depression of ravine thrusting the stream aside or
welcoming it closer, she had no further view of him until they were
both near the Settlement, Drennen himself already abreast of the first
building at this end