She shook her head. "It is not good that you be here."

"After one sleep I go."

"And my man?" she demanded, with tremulous eagerness.

Van Brunt shrugged his shoulders. He was aware of a certain secret
shame, of an impersonal sort of shame, and an anger against Fairfax.
And he felt the warm blood in his face as he regarded the young
savage. She was just a woman. 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 man! My man! My man!" 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.

"Thom," 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 fleshpots afar,
you cannot understand what it is to yearn for a fair woman's face. And
the woman is fair, Thom, 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