other men, she did not confess to waiting for him; she evaded the question with herself, and found pretexts.  She would have continued doing so with Conquest, had not his persistency driven her to her last stand.  But now that she had uttered the words for his benefit, she had to repeat them for her own.  Notwithstanding her passionate love of woods, winds, and waters, she had always been so sane, so practical, in the things that pertained to daily life that she experienced something like surprise at detecting herself in this condition of avowed romance.  She had actually been waiting for Norrie Ford to return, and say what he had told her he would say, should it ever become possible!  She was waiting for him still!  If he never came she would rather go on waiting for him—­uselessly!  The language almost shocked her; but now that the thing was spoken she admitted it was true.  It was a light thrown on herself—­if not precisely a new light, at least one from which all shades and colored wrappings that delude the eye and obscure the judgment had been struck away.

She smiled to herself to think how little Conquest understood her when he ascribed to her the ambition to graft her ungarnered branch on the stock of a duly cultivated civilization.  She might have had that desire once, but it was long past.  It was a kind of glory to her now to be outside the law—­with Norrie Ford.  There they were exiles together, in a wild paradise with joys of its own, not less sweet than those of any Eden.  She had faced more than once the question of being “taken into the orchard,” as Conquest put it.  The men who had asked her at various times to marry them had been like himself, men of middle age, or approaching it—­men of assured position either by birth or by attainment.  As the wife of any one of them her place would have been unquestioned.  She had not rejected their offers lightly, or from any foregone conclusion.  She had taken it as a duty to weigh each one seriously as it came; and, leaving the detail of love apart, she had asked herself whether it was not right for her to seize the occasion of becoming “some one” in the world.  Once or twice the position offered her was so much in accordance with her tastes that her refusal brought with it a certain vague regret.  “But I couldn’t do it,” were the words with which she woke from every dream of seeing herself mistress in a quiet English park, or a big house in New York.  Her habits might be those of civilized mankind; but her heart was listening for a call from beyond the limits in which men have the recognized right to live.  She could put no shackles on her freedom to respond to it—­if it ever came.

XIV

She discovered that Norrie Ford had come back, and that some of her expectations were fulfilled by finding him actually seated beside her one evening at dinner.