which were smothered simmering broths, roasting grouse and browning biscuit—with the padding footsteps of the little Indian maiden, with her bright face and playful, kittenish, comradely ways to feed him and coddle him and make over his bruised spirit! Why, that lodge on that island appealed to him as the most delectable spot in the world right now.
The picture took hold of him so violently that he rose to his feet in contemplation of its prospect; and Lahleet rose with him. They came up almost as one, with her suddenly clinging so to him that Harrington took quick, startled account of what was happening; he saw her eyes glowing up into his, her lips yearning toward his lips until their wistfulness was pain; and he felt her veins hot against his veins.
"My island, Henry," she panted, "and me!" Then her eyes closed, her chin pressed his breast.
Harrington himself was breathless; his heart stopped while he comprehended slowly. The girl was offering to his hectored spirit a haven that was paradise; but with it she was offering—herself! At last he realized it. Lahleet loved him; she was confessing it—proclaiming it; but even then he thought it had just broken out of her, and the fact seemed to him at once glorious and pitiful. The elemental in her had triumphed over the stoic. With heart of gold, but with coppery drops in the warm tide that visited it, she had suddenly found this new thing in her and scorned to suppress it for one moment. She had flung away the white maiden's coy inhibitions, if ever she had held them, and frankly, with the chaste simplicity of the natura] woman, disclosed to him a preference and a meaning that his eyes had been too blind to see.
