John Fairfax

John, I think it is.

John Fairfax.' "'How did you know?' Fairfax queried lazily, half-absorbed in curling smoke spirals upward in the quiet air.

"'The papers were full of it at the time.

Provenche—' "'Provenche!' Fairfax sat up, suddenly alert.

That was all a woman, the whole sordid story over again, over and over again, as old as Eve and young as the last new love-light.

"'My men! My men! My men!' she was reiterating vehemently, her face passionately dark, and the ruthless tenderness of the eternal woman, the mate-woman, looking out at him from her eyes.

thumb he said gravely in english you were born in the northland forest and you have eaten fish and meat and fought with frost and famine and lived simply all the days of your life and there are many things indeed not simple which you do not know and cannot come to understand you do not know what it is to long for the flesh-pot so far you cannot understand what it is to yearn for a fair woman's face and the woman is fair thumb the woman is nobly fair you have been woman to this man and you have been your all but your all is very little very simple too little and too simple and he is an alien man him you have never known you can never know it is so ordained you held him in your arms but you never held his heart this man with his blurring seasons and his dreams of a barbaric end dreams and dream dust that is what he has been to you you clutched at form and gripped shadow gave yourself to a man embedded with the wraith of a man in such manner of old did the daughters of men whom the gods found fair and thom thom i should not like to be john fairfax in the night watches of the years to come in the night watches when his eyes shall see not the sun-gloried hair of the woman by his side, but the dark tresses of a mate forsaken in the forests of the north.

Though she did not understand, she had listened with intense attention, as though life hung on his speech.