“Oh, but it’s not that I mean,” she answered quickly; “it’s something I feel about him, something in his soul, something he hardly knows himself, but that may come out if we are much together. It draws me, I feel, tremendously. It stirs what is wild in me—deep down—oh, very deep down—yet at the same time makes me feel afraid.”
“I suppose his thoughts are always playing about you,” I said, “but he’s nice-minded and—”
“Yes, yes,” she interrupted impatiently, “I can trust myself absolutely with him. He’s gentle and singularly pure-minded. But there’s something else that—” She stopped again sharply to listen. Then she came up close beside me in the darkness, whispering—
“You know, Mr. Hubbard, sometimes my intuitions warn me a little too strongly to be ignored. Oh, yes, you needn’t tell me again that it’s difficult to distinguish between fancy and intuition. I know all that. But I also know that there’s something deep down in that man’s soul that calls to something deep down in mine. And at present it frightens me. Because I cannot make out what it is; and I know, I know, he’ll do something some day that—that will shake my life to the very bottom.” She laughed a little at the strangeness of her own description.
I turned to look at her more closely, but the darkness was too great to show her face. There was an intensity, almost of suppressed passion, in her voice that took me completely by surprise.
“Nonsense, Joan,” I said, a little severely; “you know him well. He’s been with your father for months now.”
“But that was in London; and up here it’s different—I mean, I feel that it may be different. Life in a place like this blows away the restraints of the artificial life at home. I know, oh, I know what I’m saying. I feel all untied in a place like this; the rigidity of one’s nature begins to melt and flow. Surely you must understand what I mean!”
“Of course I understand,” I replied, yet not wishing to encourage her in her present line of thought, “and it’s a grand experience—for a short time. But you’re overtired tonight, Joan, like the rest of us. A few days in this air will set you above all fears of the kind you mention.”
Then, after a moment’s silence, I added, feeling I should estrange her confidence altogether if I blundered any more and treated her like a child—
“I think, perhaps, the true explanation is that you pity him for loving you, and at the same time you feel the repulsion of the healthy, vigorous animal for what is weak and timid. If he came up boldly and took you by the throat and shouted that he would force you to love him—well, then you would feel no fear at all. You would know exactly how to deal with him. Isn’t it, perhaps, something of that kind?”
The girl made no reply, and when I took her hand I felt that it trembled a little and was cold.
“It’s not his love that I’m afraid of,” she said hurriedly, for at this moment we heard the dip of a paddle in the water, “it’s something in his very soul that terrifies me in a way I have never been terrified before—yet fascinates me. In town I was hardly conscious of his presence. But the moment we got away from civilisation, it began to come. He seems so—so real up here. I dread being alone with him. It makes me feel that something must burst and tear its way out—that he would do something—or I should do something—I don’t know exactly what I mean, probably—but that I should let myself go and scream—”
“Joan!”
“Don’t be alarmed,” she laughed shortly; “I shan’t do anything silly, but I wanted to tell you my feelings in case I needed your help. When I have intuitions as strong as this they are never wrong, only I don’t know yet what it means exactly.”
“You must hold out for the month, at any rate,” I said in as matter-of-fact a voice as I could manage, for her manner had somehow changed my surprise to a subtle sense of alarm. “Sangree only stays the month, you know. And, anyhow, you are such an odd creature yourself that you should feel generously towards other odd creatures,” I ended lamely, with a forced laugh.
She gave my hand a sudden pressure. “I’m glad I’ve told you at any rate,” she said quickly under her breath, for the canoe was now gliding up silently like a ghost to our feet, “and I’m glad you’re here, too,” she added as we moved down towards the water to meet it.
I made Sangree change into the bows and got into the steering seat myself, putting the girl between us so that I could watch them both by keeping their outlines against the sea and stars. For the intuitions of certain folk—women and children usually, I confess—I have always felt a great respect that has more often than not been justified by experience; and now the curious emotion stirred in me by the girl’s words remained somewhat vividly in my consciousness. I explained it in some measure by the fact that the girl, tired out by the fatigue of many days’ travel, had suffered a vigorous reaction of some kind from the strong, desolate scenery, and further, perhaps, that she had been treated to my own experience of seeing the members of the party in a new light—the Canadian, being partly a stranger, more vividly than the rest of us. But, at the same time, I felt it was quite possible that she had sensed some subtle link between his personality and her own, some quality that she had hitherto ignored and that the routine of town life had kept buried out of sight. The only thing that seemed difficult to explain was the fear she had spoken of, and
