To have chafed and been unhappy here, to a spirit like either Bruce Standing's or Lynette Brooke's, would have seemed next door to an impossibility. Even the girl, though restrained, a prisoner of a man's will when the bright star of her life had ever been one of splendid independence, found it easier to smile or laugh aloud at the sober-faced antics of Thor ... when she and Thor were alone with none to see!... than to sigh. She knew her periods of restiveness and bitter rebellion; they were due not to her environment, but to the thought that another than herself was dictating to her. But for one reason or another these periods were rarer and briefer than her other hours of a strange sort of peacefulness.
"It's because I've been worn out and only now am resting," she tried to tell herself. "Recuperating from a condition of exhausted mind and body."
Thus four days and nights passed. There had been, during all that time, not the slightest opportunity to escape. The first day Standing had hurled the chain from him, as far as he could send it. But he had not lost sight of her for more than a few minutes at a time, saving such times that she gave him her promise that she would wait for him to come back. He accepted her word as he expected all the world to accept his. On other occasions, when he allowed her briefer freedoms, he had said merely: "No chance to run for it, girl! I'd overtake you, you know, in no time. Even if you hid, here'd be old Thor, nosing you out!" Then he laughed, adding: "For his own sake, the renegade, as well as for his master's! He's fallen in love with you, too." He made her bed in the rock-and-tree grotto; he labored, one-handed, over it for hours. With his heavy clasp knife he cut the tender tips of resinous branches; he heaped them high; he covered all with great handfuls of fragrant grass, thick with the tall red flowers that grew down by the creek, odorous with the tender white blossoms which shyly lifted their little heads to dot the grassy slopes.... He made her a bathing-pool: stiff and sore all up and down his left side, he worked with his right hand, dragging big boulders up out of their ancient beds, piling them in a ring about the pool, plastering them over the top with great handfuls of that carpet-like moss which thrived in these cool places.