The Indian on the Trail | Page 2

such gigantic passion?"
"The power is all in your imagination. You simply don't know me. You think I am a prize. Why, I--flirt--and I've--kissed men!"
He laughed. "You would be a queer girl, at your age, if you hadn't--kissed men--a little. Whatever your terrible past has been, it has made you the infinite darling that you are!"
She moved her eyes to watch the leaves twinkling in front of the lime-kiln.
"I must go," she said.
"'I must go'!" he mocked. "You are no sooner here than--' I must go '!"
"I can't be with you all the time. You don't care for appearances, so I have to.".
"Appearances are nothing. This is the only real thing in the universe."
"But I really must go." She lifted her wilful chin and sat still. They stared at each other in the silence of lovers. Though the girl's face was without a line, she was more skilled in the play of love than he.
"Indeed I must go. Your eyes are half shut, like a gentian."
"When you are living intensely you don't look at the world through wide-open eyes," said Maurice. "I never let myself go before. Repression has been the law of my life. Think of it! In a long life-time I have loved but two persons--the woman I told you of, and you. Twenty years ago I found out what life meant. For the first time, I knew! But I was already married. I took that beautiful love by the throat and choked it down. Afterwards, when I was free, the woman I first loved was married. How long I have had to wait for you to bloom, lotos flower! This is living! All the other years were preparation."
"Do you never see her?" inquired the girl.
"Who? That first one? I have avoided her."
"She loved you?"
"With the blameless passion that we both at first thought was the most perfect friendship."
"Wouldn't you marry her now if she were free?"
"No. It is ended. We have grown apart in renunciation for twenty years. I am not one that changes easily, you see. You have taken what I could not withhold from you, and it is yours. I am in your power."
They heard a great steamer blowing upon the strait. Its voice reverberated through the woods. The girl's beautiful face was full of a tender wistfulness, half maternal. Neither jealousy nor pique marred its exquisite sympathy. It was such an expression as an untamed wood-nymph might have worn, contemplating the life of man.
"Don't be sad," she breathed.
Vague terror shot through Maurice's gaze.
"That is a strange thing for you to say to me, Lily. Is it all you can say--when I love you so?"
"I was thinking of the other woman. Did she suffer?"
"At any rate, she has the whole world now--beauty, talent, wealth, social prestige. She is one of the most successful women in this country."
"Do I know her name?"
"Quite well. She has been a person of consequence since you were a child."
"I couldn't capture the whole world," mused Lily. Maurice kissed her small fingers.
"Some one else will put it in your lap, to keep or throw away as you choose."
The hurried tink-tank of an approaching cow-bell suggested passers. Then a whir of wheels could be heard through tangled wilderness. The girl met his lips with a lingering which trembled through all his body, and withdrew herself.
"Now I am going. Are you coming down the trail with me?"
Maurice shut the lime-kiln door, and crossed with her a grassy avenue to find among birches the ravelled ends of a path called the White Islander's Trail. You may know it first by a triangle of roots at the foot of an oak. Thence a thread, barely visible to expert eyes, winds to some mossy dead pines and crosses a rotten log. There it becomes a trail cleaving the heights, and plunging boldly up and down evergreen glooms to a road parallel with the cliff. Once, when the island was freshly drenched in rain, Lily breathed deeply, gazing down the tunnel floored with rock and pine-needles, a flask of incense. "It is like the violins!"
In that seclusion of heaven Maurice could draw her slim shape to him, for the way is so narrow that two are obliged to walk close. They parted near the wider entrance, where a stump reared itself against the open sky, bearing a stick like a bow, and having the appearance of a crouching figure.
"There is the Indian on the trail," said Lily. "You must go back now."
"He looks so formidable," said Maurice; "especially in twilight, and, except at noon, it is always twilight here. But when you reach him he is nothing but a stump."
"He is more than a stump," she insisted. "He is a real Indian, and some day will get up and take a scalp! It gives me a shiver every