ble sweetness. She
would sing, since he told her to, her voice beating its wings against
the walls of the house or ringing down the canyon in untrammeled
flight. Prosper was lost in wonder of her, in a passionate admiration
for his own handiwork. He was making, here in this God-forsaken
solitude, a thing of marvel; what he was making surely justified the
means. Joan's laughable simplicity and directness were the same; they
were part of her essence; no civilizing could confuse or disturb them;
but she changed, her brain grew, it absorbed material, it attempted
adventures. Nowadays Joan sometimes argued, and this filled Prosper
with delight, so quaint and logical she was and so skillful.

They were reading out under the firs by the green lip of the lake,
when Wen Ho led his pack-horse up the trail. He had been gone a month,
for Prosper had sent him out of the valley to a distant town for his
supplies. He didn't want the little frontier place to prick up its
ears. Wen Ho had ridden by a secret trail back over the range; he had
not passed even the ranger station on his way. He called out, and, in
the midst of a sentence Joan was reading, Prosper started up.

Joan looked at him smiling. "You're as easily turned away from
learning as a boy," she began, and faltered when she saw his face. It
was turned eagerly toward the climbing horses, toward the pack, and it
was sharp and keen with detached interest, an excitement that had
nothing, nothing in the world to do with her.

It was the great bundle of Prosper's mail that first brought home to
Joan the awareness of an outside world. She knew that Prosper was a
traveled and widely experienced man, but she had not fancied him held
to this world by human attachments. Concerning the "tall child" she
had not put a question and she still believed her to have been
Prosper's wife. But when, leaving her place under the tree, she came
into the house and found Prosper feverishly slitting open envelope
after envelope, with a pile of papers and magazines, ankle-high,
beside him on the floor, she stood aghast.

"What a lot of people must have been writing to you, Prosper!"

He did not hear her. He was greedy of eye and fingertips, searching
written sheet after sheet. He was flushed along the cheek-bones and a
little pale about the lips. Joan stood there, her hands hanging, her
head bent, staring up and out at him from under her brows. She looked,
in this attitude, rather dangerous.

Pros