The first evening after his arrival from the swamps to the west, he
came to the cabin. His beard had grown again. His hair was long and
shaggy, and fell in shining dishevelment upon his shoulders. The
sensitive beauty of his great eyes, once responsive to every passing
humor in Melisse, flashing fun at her laughter, glowing softly in
their devotion, was gone. His face was filled with the age-old silence
of the forest man. Firmly and yet gently, it repelled whatever of the
old things she might have said and done, holding her away from him as
if by power of a strong hand.
This time Melisse knew that there was left not even the last
comforting spark of hope within her bosom. Jan had gone out of her
life for ever, leaving to her, as a haunting ghost of what they two
had once been to each other, the old violin on the cabin wall.
After he went away again, the violin became more and more to her what
it had once been to him. She played it as he had played it, sobbing
her loneliness and her heart-break through its strings, in lone hours
clasping it to her breast and speaking to it as Jan had talked to it
in years gone by.
"If you could only tell me--if you only could!" she whispered to it
one day, when the autumn was drawing near. "If you could tell me about
him, and what I might do--dear old violin!"
Once during the autumn Jan came in for supplies and traps, and his
dogs and sledge.
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