第83章

Our meeting-place--do you remember how I found you down there by the old pole trail, staring as though you had seen a ghost?--and that beautiful, beautiful music! It must always be our most sacred memory.Promise me you will save it until the very, very last."Thorpe said nothing because he could not rally his faculties.The sentimental association connected with the grove had actually never occurred to him.His keepsakes were impressions which he carefully guarded in his memory.To the natural masculine indifference toward material bits of sentiment he had added the instinct of the strictly portable early developed in the rover.He had never even possessed a photograph of his sister.Now this sudden discovery that such things might be part of the woof of another person's spiritual garment came to him ready-grown to the proportions of a problem.

In selecting the districts for the season's cut, he had included in his estimates this very grove.Since then he had seen no reason for changing his decision.The operations would not commence until winter.By that time the lovers would no longer care to use it as at present.Now rapidly he passed in review a dozen expedients by which his plan might be modified to permit of the grove's exclusion.

His practical mind discovered flaws in every one.Other bodies of timber promising a return of ten thousand dollars were not to be found near the river, and time now lacked for the cutting of roads to more distant forties.

"Hilda," he broke in abruptly at last, "the men you hear are clearing a road to this very timber.""What do you mean?" she asked.

"This timber is marked for cutting this very winter."She had not a suspicion of the true state of affairs."Isn't it lucky I spoke of it!" she exclaimed."How could you have forgotten to countermand the order! You must see to it to-day; now!"She sprang up impulsively and stood waiting for him.He arose more slowly.Even before he spoke her eyes dilated with the shock from her quick intuitions.

"Hilda, I cannot," he said.

She stood very still for some seconds.

"Why not?" she asked quietly.

"Because I have not time to cut a road through to another bunch of pine.It is this or nothing.""Why not nothing, then?"

"I want the money this will bring."

His choice of a verb was unfortunate.The employment of that one little word opened the girl's mind to a flood of old suspicions which the frank charm of the northland had thrust outside.Hilda Farrand was an heiress and a beautiful girl.She had been constantly reminded of the one fact by the attempts of men to use flattery of the other as a key to her heart and her fortune.From early girlhood she had been sought by the brilliant impecunious of two continents.

The continued experience had varnished her self-esteem with a glaze of cynicism sufficiently consistent to protect it against any but the strongest attack.She believed in no man's protestations.She distrusted every man's motives as far as herself was concerned.This attitude of mind was not unbecoming in her for the simple reason that it destroyed none of her graciousness as regards other human relations besides that of love.That men should seek her in matrimony from a selfish motive was as much to be expected as that flies should seek the sugar bowl.She accepted the fact as one of nature's laws, annoying enough but inevitable; a thing to guard against, but not one of sufficient moment to grieve over.

With Thorpe, however, her suspicions had been lulled.There is something virile and genuine about the woods and the men who inhabit them that strongly predisposes the mind to accept as proved in their entirety all the other virtues.Hilda had fallen into this state of mind.She endowed each of the men whom she encountered with all the robust qualities she had no difficulty in recognizing as part of nature's charm in the wilderness.Now at a word her eyes were opened to what she had done.She saw that she had assumed unquestioningly that her lover possessed the qualities of his environment.

Not for a moment did she doubt the reality of her love.She had conceived one of those deep, uplifting passions possible only to a young girl.But her cynical experience warned her that the reality of that passion's object was not proven by any test besides the fallible one of her own poetizing imagination.The reality of the ideal she had constructed might be a vanishable quantity even though the love of it was not.So to the interview that ensued she brought, not the partiality of a loving heart, nor even the impartiality of one sitting in judgment, but rather the perverted prejudice of one who actually fears the truth.

"Will you tell me for what you want the money?" she asked.

The young man caught the note of distrust.At once, instinctively, his own confidence vanished.He drew within himself, again beyond the power of justifying himself with the needed word.

"The firm needs it in the business," said he.

Her next question countered instantaneously.

"Does the firm need the money more than you do me?"They stared at each other in the silence of the situation that had so suddenly developed.It had come into being without their volition, as a dust cloud springs up on a plain.

"You do not mean that, Hilda," said Thorpe quietly."It hardly comes to that.""Indeed it does," she replied, every nerve of her fine organization strung to excitement."I should be more to you than any firm.""Sometimes it is necessary to look after the bread and butter,"Thorpe reminded her gently, although he knew that was not the real reason at all.