ked long at
Joan, long into the fire, and she lay still, with the brooding beauty
of that first-heard melody upon her face.

It was the first music she had ever heard, "except whistlin'," but there
had been a great deal of "whistlin'" about the cabin up Lone River;
whistling of robins in spring--nothing sweeter--the chordlike whistlings
of thrush and vireo after sunset, that bubbling "mar-guer-ite" with
which the blackbirds woo, and the light diminuendo with which the
bluebird caressed the air after an April flight. Perhaps Joan's musical
faculty was less untrained than any other. After all, that "Aubade
Provencale" was just the melodious story of the woods in spring. Every
note linked itself to an emotional, subconscious memory. It filled
Joan's heart with the freshness of childhood and pained her only because
it struck a spear of delight into her pain. She was eighteen, she had
grown like a tree, drinking in sunshine and storm, but rooted to a
solitude where very little else but sense-experience could reach her
mind. She had seen tragedies of animal life, lonely death-struggles,
horrible flights and more horrible captures, she had seen joyous
wooings, love-pinings, partings, and bereavements. She had seen maternal
fickleness and maternal constancy, maternal savagery; the end of mated
bliss and its--renewal. She had seen the relentless catastrophes of
storm. There had been starving winters and renewing springs, sad
beautiful autumns, the riotous waste and wantonness of summer. These had
all been objective experiences, but Joan's untamed and undistracted
heart had taken them in deeply and deeply pondered upon them. There was
no morality in their teachings, unless it was the morality of complete
suspension of any judgment whatsoever, the marvelous literal, "Judge
not." She knew that the sun shone on the evil and on the good, but she
knew also that frost fell upon the good as well as upon the evil nor was
the evil to be readily distinguished. Her father prated of only one
offense, her mother's sin. Joan knew that it was a man's right to kill
his woman for "dealin's with another man." This law was human; it
evidently did not hold good with animals. There was no bitterness,
though some ferocity, in the traffic of their loves.

While she pondered through the first sleepless nights in this strange
shelter of hers, and while the blizzard Prosper had counted on drove
bayoneted battalions of snow across the plains and forced th