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longing would lie down and be quiet." She stopped writing. Would it?
Would it lie down and be quiet with just a look? A look would be a
deep drink of living waters, she knew that; but would it, would it lie
down and be quiet? She didn't intend ever to stop loving him. As long
as she loved him, and stayed where love could grow by what it fed on,
would it lie quiet? Was this keeping him strong to his resolution?

She tore the paper to tiny atoms and burned the scraps bit by bit on
her metal paper knife above the candle. Then, she blew out the candle
and drew his soiled field-book leaf from her breast. She fell asleep
with her head on her arm, and her lips pressed to that fool-thing he
had signed at the bottom of his note, "Dick (the nth)," whatever that
meant.

There was no mistaking it next morning at breakfast. She felt strung
and upset; and her father looked at her strangely; and Matthews was so
keen on covering the general embarrassment that he aimed too far in the
other direction, rattling off such a fusilade of Western stories that
they sounded hollow. She forgot her own confusion studying the two
men. How stooped her father looked! He looked, what was it? Like a
man who has waited a long time for something to come, and when it has
come, found himself too sad to seize it. His eyes looked as if he had
not slept; and Eleanor now observed that the frontiersman's sun-burned
nose had a suspicious shine at the end. If she had not been undone
from her own bad night, she would have helped their efforts to cover
embarrassment; but now a horrible thought came; a thought born of the
low innuendo in the scandal story; and the thought finished her. She
felt her self-control going and rose and fled round the end of the
table to her room. The old frontiersman stopped mid-way in his story
of the brats of Blackfoot boys stealing every stitch of his clothing
one day he was bathing in Lower Saskatchewan. Her father jumped to his
feet and threw out one arm to stop her. That finished Eleanor. He had
never done such a thing before. The only time he had ever shown
affection was that night when she had read the scandal in the paper and
he had reached up his hand and taken hers. Now, he held her in his
arms, bowed, broken, unspeaking. The tears came in a rain. She did
not hide her face after the manner of tenderly nurtured shrinking
women. She faced him with wide open lashes and brimming eyes and
burning defian