JOAN LACKLAND.
He fingered the letter, lingering over it and scrutinizing the writing in
a way that was not his wont. How characteristic, was his thought, as he
studied the boyish scrawl--clear to read, painfully, clear, but none the
less boyish. The clearness of it reminded him of her face, of her
cleanly stencilled brows, her straightly chiselled nose, the very
clearness of the gaze of her eyes, the firmly yet delicately moulded
lips, and the throat, neither fragile nor robust, but--but just right, he
concluded, an adequate and beautiful pillar for so shapely a burden.
He looked long at the name. Joan Lackland--just an assemblage of
letters, of commonplace letters, but an assemblage that generated a
subtle and heady magic. It crept into his brain and twined and twisted
his mental processes until all that constituted him at that moment went
out in love to that scrawled signature. A few commonplace letters--yet
they caused him to know in himself a lack that sweetly hurt and that
expressed itself in vague spiritual outpourings and delicious yearnings.
Joan Lackland! Each time he looked at it there arose visions of her in a
myriad moods and guises--coming in out of the flying smother of the gale
that had wrecked her schooner; launching a whale-boat to go a-fishing;
running dripping from the sea, with streaming hair and clinging garments,
to the fresh-water shower; frightening four-score cannibals with an empty
chlorodyne bottle; teaching Ornfiri how to make bread; hanging her
Stetson hat and revolver-belt on the hook in the living-room; talking
gravely about winning to hearth and saddle of her own, or juvenilely
rattling on about romance and adventure, bright-eyed, her face flushed
and eager with enthusiasm.
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