This black-forested rock-rimmed land of untrodden ways was a world that in itself would satisfy him.
Some instinct in Jean called for a lonely, wild land, into the fastnesses of which he could roam at will and be the other strange self that he had always yearned to be but had never been.
Every few moments there intruded into his flowing consciousness the flashing face of Ellen Jorth, the way she had looked at him, the things she had said.

"Reckon I was a fool," he soliloquized, with an acute sense of humiliation.

"She never saw how much in earnest I was." And Jean began to remember the circumstances with a vividness that disturbed and perplexed him.
The accident of running across such a girl in that lonely place might be out of the ordinary--but it had happened.

Surprise had made him dull.

The charm of her appearance, the appeal of her manner, must have drawn him at the very first, but he had not recognized that.