Joan found the water cold as ice, soothing to the burn beneath her skin.  She walked away then, aware that Kells did not appear to care, and went up to where the brook brawled from under the cliff.  This was a hundred paces from camp, though in plain sight.  Joan looked round for her horse, but he was not to be seen.  She decided to slip away the first opportunity that offered, and on foot or horseback, any way, to get out of Kells’s clutches if she had to wander, lost in the mountains, till she starved.  Possibly the day might be endurable, but another night would drive her crazy.  She sat on a ledge, planning and brooding, till she was startled by a call from Kells.  Then slowly she retraced her steps.

“Don’t you want to eat?” he asked.

“I’m not hungry,” she replied.

“Well, eat anyhow—­if it chokes you,” he ordered.

Joan seated herself while he placed food and drink before her.  She did not look at him and did not feel his gaze upon her.  Far asunder as they had been yesterday the distance between them to-day was incalculably greater.  She ate as much as she could swallow and pushed the rest away.  Leaving the camp-fire, she began walking again, here and there, aimlessly, scarcely seeing what she looked at.  There was a shadow over her, an impending portent of catastrophe, a moment standing dark and sharp out of the age-long hour.  She leaned against the balsam and then she rested in the stone seat, and then she had to walk again.  It might have been long, that time; she never knew how long or short.  There came a strange flagging, sinking of her spirit, accompanied by vibrating, restless, uncontrollable muscular activity.  Her nerves were on the verge of collapse.

It was then that a call from Kells, clear and ringing, thrilled all the weakness from her in a flash, and left her limp and cold.  She saw him coming.  His face looked amiable again, bright against what seemed a vague and veiled background.  Like a mountaineer he strode.  And she looked into his strange, gray glance to see unmasked the ruthless power, the leaping devil, the ungovernable passion she had sensed in him.

He grasped her arm and with a single pull swung her to him.  “You’ve got to pay that ransom!”

He handled her as if he thought she resisted, but she was unresisting.  She hung her head to hide her eyes.  Then he placed an arm round her shoulders and half led, half dragged her toward the cabin.

Joan saw with startling distinctness the bits of balsam and pine at her feet and pale pink daisies in the grass, and then the dry withered boughs.  She was in the cabin.

“Girl! ...  I’m hungry—­for you!” he breathed, hoarsely.  And turning her toward him, he embraced her, as if his nature was savage and he had to use a savage force.