He set down her abstraction to grief over David.
When he tried to cheer her, her absorbed preoccupation gave place to
the old restlessness, and once again she watched and listened. These
were her only moods--periods of musing when she rode in front of the
wagon with vacant eyes fixed on the winding seam of the trail, and
periods of nervous agitation when she turned in her saddle to sweep the
road behind her and ordered him to build the night fire high and bright.
The old servant was puzzled. Something foreign in her, an inner
vividness of life, a deeper current of vitality, told him that this was
not a woman preyed upon by a gnawing grief. He noted, without
understanding, a change in her bearing to Courant and his to her.
Without words to give it expression he saw in her attitude to the
leader a pliant, docile softness, a surreptitious leap of light in the
glance that fell upon him in quick welcome before her lids shut it in.
With Courant the change showed in a possessive tenderness, a brooding
concern. When, at the morning start, he waited as she rode toward him,
his face was irradiated with a look that made the old man remember the
dead loves of his youth.
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