Jan had been mother,
brother, and everything that was tender and sweet to her--and he was
gone. Mukee, whom she had loved, was gone. Williams was gone. The
world was changed, terribly and suddenly, and it added years to her
perspective of things.
Each day, as the weeks went on, and the spring sun began to soften the
snow, she became a little more like the wild children at Lac Bain and
in the forest. For Jan, she had kept her hair soft and bright, because
he praised her for it and told her it was pretty. Now it hung in
tangles down her back.
There came a night when she forgot her prayer, and Cummins did not
notice it. He failed to notice it the next night, and the next.
Plunged deep in his own gloom, he was unobservant of many other
things, so that, in place of laughter and joy and merry rompings, only
gloomy and oppressive shadows of things that had come and gone filled
the life of the little cabin.
They were eating dinner, one day in the early spring, with the
sunshine flooding in upon them, when a quick, low footfall caused
Melisse to lift her eyes in the direction of the open door. A strange
figure stood there, with bloodless face, staring eyes, and garments
hanging in tatters--but its arms were stretched out, as those same
arms had been held out to her a thousand times before, and, with the
old glad cry, Melisse darted with the swiftness of a sun-shadow beyond
Cummins, crying:
"Jan, Jan--my Jan!"
Words choked in Cummins' throat when he saw the white-faced figure
clutching Melisse to its breast.
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