And when the soft darkness was fully come, and the low murmuring voices
of the night whispered from forest depth and mountain side, while the
stars peered through the weaving of leaf and branch, and the ruddy light
of their camp fire rose and fell, the man talked of the things that had
gone into the making of his life. As though he wished his mate to know
him more fully than anyone else could know, he spoke of those personal
trials and struggles, those disappointments and failures, those plans
and triumphs of which men so rarely speak; of his boyhood and his
boyhood home life, of his father and mother, of those hard years of his
youth, and his struggle for an education that would equip him for his
chosen life work; he told her many things that she had known only in a
general way.
But most of all he talked of those days when he had first met her, and
of how quickly and surely the acquaintance had grown into friendship,
and then into a love which he dared not yet confess. Smilingly he told
how he had tried to convince himself that she was not for him. And how,
believing that she loved and would wed his friend, Lawrence Knight, he
had come to the far West, to his work, and, if he could, to forget.
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