Zona Gale - Heart's Kindred

He lifted himself, and scrambled forward toward her.

“We’re lost,” he said thickly. “Wha’d we care? Wha’d we care…”

He put out his arms, but they did not touch her. He swept a circle, and they did not enclose her. Alarmed, he rose and lurched forward, feeling out in all directions, an arm’s span. And she was not within his reach nor within the crazy length which he ran, with outspread hands, trying to find her.

At last his foot caught in a root and he fell, and lay there, and began quietly weeping. Now she was gone and the trail was gone. He was treated like a dog by both of them. He fumbled for his pack, but he had slipped that off when he climbed the rocks, and now that was gone too. He wept, and lay still. In a few moments he was sleeping.

When he awoke, he looked into soft branches, gray in dim light. The whole mountain was lyric with birds. There was no other sound, save the lift and touch of branches, and the chatter of a squirrel, and there was as yet no sun.

He remembered. And with the memory, a rush of aching, eating shame seized on him and he closed his eyes again. Then he thought that he must have dreamed it all. And that it was impossible that such a thing should be. Yet here he was in the woods, where she had left him because he was a fool. Where had she gone? He sprang up, mad to find her, possessed by the need to make amends, and by the sheer need to find her.

As he sat up, he threw off his blanket, and he marvelled that this should have been covering him. Then he found himself looking into Lory Moor’s face.

She was sitting near him, wrapped in her own blanket, leaning against a tree. She was wide awake, and by all signs she had been so for a long time, for a great cluster of mountain violets lay on her blanket.

When she saw that he was awake, she smiled, and this seemed to the Inger the most marvellous thing that ever had befallen him: that she was there and that she smiled.

He looked at her silently, and slowly under the even brownness of his skin, the color rose from his throat to his forehead, and burned crimson. But more than this color of shame, it was his eyes that told. They were upon her, brown, deep, like the eyes of a dog that has disobeyed, and has come back. For a moment he looked at her, then he dropped his face in his hands.

She moved so quietly that he did not hear her rise. He merely felt her hand on his shoulder. And when he looked up again, she was sitting there beside him.

“Don’t,” she said.

He looked at her in amazement. Her look was gentle, her voice had been gentle.

“You mustn’t,” she said. “It’s all over now.”

“What do you think of me? What do you think of me?” he muttered, stupidly.

She shrugged lightly. “It don’t make any difference what I think of you,” she said. “Ain’t it whether I’m goin’ to get away from Inch or not? Ain’t that the idea?”

When he came to think of it, that was the immediate concern. With his first utterance he had blundered, as he had blundered since the moment when she had put herself in his keeping. None the less his misery was too sharp to dismiss. But he had no clear idea how to ask a woman’s forgiveness – a thing that he had never done in his life.

“I feel as bad as hell,” he blurted out.

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