go down the canon. You'd be worse off.... Take the back
trail. You've got a chance to get out.... Go!"

"Leave you here? So weak you can't lift a cup! I won't."

"I'd rather you did."

"Why?"

"Because in a few days I'll begin to mend. Then I'll grow
like--myself.... I think--I'm afraid I loved you.... It could only be
hell for you. Go now, before it's too late!... If you stay--till I'm
well--I'll never let you go!"

"Kells, I believe it would be cowardly for me to leave you here alone,"
she replied, earnestly. "You can't help yourself. You'd die."

"All the better. But I won't die. I'm hard to kill. Go, I tell you."

She shook her head. "This is bad for you--arguing. You're excited.
Please be quiet."

"Joan Randle, if you stay--I'll halter you--keep you naked in a
cave--curse you--beat you--murder you! Oh, it's in me!... Go, I tell
you!"

"You're out of your head. Once for all--no!" she replied, firmly.

"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