assurance, steady, secret, determined. She detected
this chiefly when he glanced up to her from his drawing. He had brought
with him a story to illustrate for the _Knickerbocker_, and he was, at
last, to finish that series of Western scenes for the same periodical.
And he had flown to this work with a frantic haste, with the look, as he
bent over the board, that seemed to say: "This is for you. Be patient
with me, it will soon be done."

When the work did not claim him he stayed by her side, watchful for
service, jealous of Virginia for little acts he might not himself
perform. His eyes seldom left her, she thought, though she could not
long endure their look, and she knew that he read this evasion of hers
in the light of what Teevan had told him. Through all his devotion there
was a gentle aloofness, a constant withdrawing, as if he knew that he
must never come close.

She had laughter and tears again for this when she was alone, though
there were times when, in her weakness, her wild craving for the
fullness of what she might not have, she would have told it all in one
surrendering cry to him but for the eyes of Kitty Teevan. They were
always upon her now--Ewing had hung the portrait in the studio--holding
her with passionate entreaty, the mother pleading for herself in the
son's memory. She could never tell him, she knew, under those eyes. She
must live out her few days in content with that wondrous thing his own
eyes revealed for her. She thought it comic and tragic and beautiful.
One night she dreamed that she was not to die, and woke in horror of
what his belief would then mean. But morning restored her serenity, and
she reposed placidly again on the unquestioned sureness of her going.

Best of all times she liked the late morning and midday, when she could
be alone in the sun-heated nook out of doors and give her body to the
warmth. She knew it was a primal, sensuous pleasure, but she surrendered
to it; turned and bathed writhingly in the sun flood, feeling herself
transparent to it. And the pleasure had its reverse side. Autumn came
presently in these upper reaches; a less splendid autumn than would set
the Eastern woods ablaze with flaunts of gold and scarlet, but an autumn
more eloquent of death, the faded yellow of the aspen groves, broken but
rarely by some flaming shrub that only emphasized the monotone. This,
the unending, lifeless yellow, and the dead green of spruce and
hemlock--a false green, she felt