Motion Picture Story Magazine (Feb-Jul 1912)

28 TBE MOTION PICTURE STORY MAGAZINE Else saw all and understood all, and her rage against the girl rose higher. "Dagban," she cried, "be less a dog and more a man ! You are like a starved wolf on a carcass ! I '11 not have you quarreling over this clout of a child! Do you both hear my words? It is not for her to say, but I, your mother, will dispose of her! I will keep her beside me till the springtime, and you shall leave her alone. Then, if I find her fit, she shall be yours, Dagban. If I find her ugly, as she seems to be, I will drive her away!" Chloe would have fallen, but that Dagban held her up. Else pulled her away from him. ' ' Leave her alone ! ' ' she cried. Dagban, in his heart afraid of his mother's wrath, stood still and scowled. Chloe, thru the blinding tears, peeped up and saw Eric standing still and limp, his head sunk down, a terrible sorrow upon his countenance. "Do you hear, Eric?" growled Dagban. "Curse me forever, if it shall not be as our mother says ! ' ' And so it was — almost. The difficulty was that Chloe herself was not so nearly a chattel as many a girl of today is. In the springtime Dagban began to build the hut in which he purposed to place Chloe. Eric would not go near the place. Between the brothers had come this separating wedge which bites tighter with time, which each day drives farther, which makes its way heedless of ache and pain, and which nothing has ever prevailed against — the love of a woman. Eric, indeed, was too resilient in his nature to die over a woman, one way or another. He was a dreaming man. He could look up into the sky, with its flying clouds, and cry out to them to bear him away upon their crests, and the poetry of his soul and its joy compensated in a measure. One day he stood under the shade of a flowering sycamore, his heart and brain afire with the recollections of a strange look which Chloe had shot into his heart, an hour before. He turned his eyes up to the yellowing mass and called out, soft and low: "Oh, beautiful tree, fold me in thy arms, press me against thy peaceful breast, and let my flesh melt into thy heart! For I am vain and foolish." His imagination was such that he was suffused with the thought, and for the while it was as tho the tree had transmuted him, body and bone, and he was exalted and happy. This, too, while his face streamed with tears. Else kept Chloe in her sight and hearing always. The girl was very unhappy, and despised Dagban with a strength which grew greater with each passing day. This delighted Else. Dagban, jealous enough of his brother's place in Chloe 's heart, only feared that by some mischance she might slip from his arms. He had no heart himself. He did not concern himself about Chloe 's, except as it might affect the materiality of her possession. Else might have poisoned the girl, except she was in fear of Dagban. One day, a few days before the priest was to join Chloe and Dagban in wedlock, Eric sat alone in a glade, at work on some arrows. Dagban, at some distance away, was busied upon the new home for Chloe. She, who had been suffered by Else to go out to search for berries, had strayed from her task, and, with a new light in her big eyes, she was searching for Eric. She could not call, for she feared to arouse Dagban. Ignorant of the ground, her heart almost failed her. "I will find him," she thought, "and he will take me away — I know it! I know it!" Suddenly she heard a voice calling her name. Her heart almost stopped beating, her blood turned icy. It was Dagban 's voice. She looked around, and saw him on the side of a hill, where the almost finished hut stood. "Come here! Come here!" called Dagban. Her only answer was to turn quickly and fly from the place. Dagban threw down a club with which he had been mauling a stake into the earth and ran after her. He soon lost sight