. "You came to tell me
your side. Will you tell me, please?"

For the first time she looked into his eyes and he drew in his breath
at the misery of hers.

"I built that cabin, Joan," he said, "for another woman."

"Your wife?" asked Joan.

"No."

"For the one I said must have been like a tall child? She wasn't your
wife? She was dead?"

Prosper shook his head. "No. Did you think that? She was a woman I
loved at that time very dearly and she was already married to another
man."

"You built that house for her? I don't understand."

"She had promised to leave her husband and to come away with me. I had
everything ready, those rooms, those clothes, those materials, and
when I went out to get her, I had a message saying that her courage
had failed her, that she wouldn't come."

"She was a better woman than me," said Joan bitterly.

Prosper laughed. "By God, she was not! She sent me down to hell. I
couldn't go back to the East again. I had laid very careful and
elaborate plans. I was trapped out there in that horrible winter
country...."

"It was not horrible," said Joan violently; "it was the most
wonderful, beautiful country in all the world." And tears ran suddenly
down her face.

But she would not let him come near to comfort her. "Go on," she said
presently.

"Before you came, Joan," Prosper went on, "it was horrible. It was
like being starved. Every thing in the house reminded me of--her. I
had planned it all very carefully and we were to have been--happy. You
can fancy what it was to be there alone."

Joan nodded. She _was_ just and she was honestly trying to put herself
in his place. "Yes," she said; "if I had gone back and Pierre had been
dead, his homestead would have been like that to me."

"It was because I was so miserable that I went out to hunt. I'd scour
the country all day and half the night to tire myself out, that I
could get some sleep. I was pretty far from home that moonlight night
when I heard you scream for help...."

Joan's face grew whiter. "Don't tell about that," she pleaded.

He paused, choosing another opening. "After I had bandaged you and
told you that Pierre was dead--and I honestly thought he was--I didn't
know what to do with you. You couldn't be left, and there was no
neighbor nearer than my own house; besides, I had shot a man, and,
perhaps,--I don't know, maybe I was influenced by your beauty, by my
own crazy loneliness.... You were very beautiful and very desolat