"Listen!" They stood side by side at the door. "Some silly bird thinks
that is the dawn. Look at me, Joan!"
She lifted obedient eyes.
"There! That's better. Don't get that other look. I can't bear it. I
love you."
A moment later they went out into the sweet, silver silence down to
the silver lake.
* * * * *
Four months later the name of Prosper Gael began to be on every one's
lips, and before every one's eyes; the world, his world, began to
clamor for him. Even Wen Ho grumbled at this going out on tremendous
journeys after the mail for which Prosper grew more and more greedy and
impatient. His novel, "The Cañon," had been accepted, was enormously
advertised, had made an extraordinary success. All this he explained to
Joan, who tried to rejoice because she saw that it was exquisite
delight to Prosper. He was by way of thinking now that his exile, his
Wyoming adventure, was to thank for his success, but when a woman, even
such a woman as Joan, begins to feel that she has been a useful
emotional experience, there begins pain. For Joan pain began and daily
it increased. It was suffering for her to watch Prosper reading his
letters, forwarded to him from the Western town where his friends and
his secretary believed him to be recovering from some nervous illness;
to watch him smoking and thinking of himself, his fame, his talents,
his future; to watch him scribbling notes, planning another work, to
hear his excited talk, now so impersonal, so unrelated to her; to see
how his eagerness over her education slackened, faltered, died; to
notice that he no longer watched the changeful humors of her beauty nor
cared if she wore bronze or blue or yellow; and worst of all, to find
him staring at her sometimes with a worried, impatient look which
scuttled out of sight like some ugly, many-legged creature when it met
her own eyes--painful, of course, yet such an old story. Joan, who had
never heard of such experience, did not foresee the inevitable end,
and, in so much, she was spared. The extra pain of forfeiting her
dignity and self-respect did not touch her, for she made none of those
most pitiful, unavailing efforts to hold him, to cling; did not even
pretend indifference. She only drew gradually into herself, shrinking
from her pain and from him as the cause of it; she only lost her glow
of love-happiness, her face seemed dwindled, seemed to contract, and
that secret look of a wild animal returned to her gray eyes. She
quietly gave up the old regulations of their life; she did not remind
him of the study-hours, the music-hours, the hours of wild outdoor
play. She read under the firs, alone; she studied faithfully, alone;
she climbed and swam, alone--or with his absent-minded, fitful company;
she worked in her garden, alone. At night, when he was asleep, she lay
with her hand pressed against her heart, staring at the darkness,
listening to the night, waiting. Curiously enough, his inevitable
returns of passion and interest, the always decreasing flood-mark, each
time a line lower, did not deceive her, did not distract her. She never
expressed her trouble, even to herself. She did not give it any words.
She took her pain without wincing, without complaint, and when he
seemed to need her in any little way, in any big way, she gave because
she could not help it, because she had promised him largesse, because
it was her nature to give. Besides, although she was instinctively
waiting, she did not foresee the end.