"He says he is your husband," answered her father harshly.




CHAPTER V

"BY THE RIVER STARZKE . . . IT WAS SO DONE"

There was absolute silence for a moment. The two men fixed their gaze
upon the girl. The fear which had first come to her face passed
suddenly, and a will, new-born and fearless, possessed it. Yesterday
this will had been only a trembling, undisciplined force, but since then
she had been passed through the tests which her own soul, or Destiny, had
set for her, and she had emerged a woman, confident and understanding, if
tremulous. In days gone by her adventurous, lonely spirit had driven her
to the prairies, savagely riding her Indian pony through the streets of
Manitou and out on the North Trail, or south through coulees, or westward
into the great woods, looking for what: she never found.

Her spirit was no longer the vague thing driving here and there with
pleasant torture. It had found freedom and light; what the Romany folk
call its own 'tan', its home, though it be but home of each day's trek.
That wild spirit was now a force which understood itself in a new if
uncompleted way. It was a sword free from its scabbard.

The adventure of the Carillon Rapids had been a kind of deliverance of an
unborn thing which, desiring the overworld, had found it. A few hours
ago the face of Ingolby, as she waked to consciousness in his arms, had