earched for Meta Beggs. She was not by
the kettles of sap; beyond the trees, by covered baskets of provisions
lanterns made a saffron pool of light, but she was not there. He felt in
his pocket the cool, sinuous necklace. Finally he found her; or, rather,
she slipped illusively into his contracted field of vision.

"You didn't tell me you were coming," she reproached him.

She wore a red dress, purple in the night, with a narrow, black velvet
ribband pinned about her throat; her straw hat was bound in red. She
gained an extraordinary potency from the dark; it almost seemed to Gordon
Makimmon that her skin had a luminous quality; he could see her pointed
hands distinctly, and her small, cold face. All her dresses strained about
her provocative body, an emphasis rather than a covering of her slim
maturity. They drifted, without further speech, out of the circles of
wavering light, into the obscurity beyond.

They sat, resting against a hillock of sod, facing the sinking visible rim
of the moon. From the bog the frogs sounded like a continuously and
lightly-struck xylophone. Meta Beggs shivered.

"I'll go mad here," she declared, "in this--this nothingness. Look--the
moon dropping into wilderness; other lucky people are watching it
disappear behind great houses and gardens; women in the arms of their
lovers are watching it through silk curtains."

He gazed critically over the valley, the mountains, into the sky scarfed
by night. "I'm used to it," he returned; "it doesn't bother me like it
does you. Some people even like it. A man who came here from the city to
die of lung trouble sat for weeks looking up Greenstream valley; he
couldn't get enough morning or evening."

"But I don't want to die, I want to live. I'm going to live, too; I've
decided--"

"What?"

"To stop teaching. When the term's over, in a few weeks, I'm going to take
the money I make and go to New York. It will be just enough to get me
there and buy me a pretty hat, with a few dollars over. I am going with
those into a cafe and get a bottle of champagne, and pick out the man with
the best clothes. I'll tell him I'm a poor school-teacher from the South
who came to New York to meet a man who promised to marry me, but who had
not kept his word. I'll tell him that I'm good--I can, you know; no man
has ever fooled anything out of me--and that I bought wine to get the
courage to kill myself."

"It sounds right smart," he admitted; "you can do it too, you