The Indian on the Trail | Page 2

her head.
"When you are out of my sight I do not live; I simply wait. What is the
weird power in you that creates 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