glided noiselessly away, even as an
Indian might have done.

She readjusted the slips of hanging bark with feminine ingenuity,
dispersing them so as to completely hide the entrance. Yet this did not
darken the chamber, which seemed to draw a purer and more vigorous light
through the soaring shaft that pierced the roof than that which came
from the dim woodland aisles below. Nevertheless, she shivered, and
drawing her shawl closely around her began to collect some half-burnt
fragments of wood in the chimney to make a fire. But the preoccupation
of her thoughts rendered this a tedious process, as she would from time
to time stop in the middle of an action and fall into an attitude of
rapt abstraction, with far-off eyes and rigid mouth. When she had at
last succeeded in kindling a fire and raising a film of pale blue smoke,
that seemed to fade and dissipate entirely before it reached the top of
the chimney shaft, she crouched beside it, fixed her eyes on the darkest
corner of the cavern, and became motionless.

What did she see through that shadow?

Nothing at first but a confused medley of figures and incidents of the
preceding night; things to be put away and forgotten; things that
would not have happened but for another thing--the thing before which
everything faded! A ball-room; the sounds of music; the one man she
had cared for insulting her with the flaunting ostentation of his
unfaithfulness; herself despised, put aside, laughed at, or worse,
jilted. And then the moment of delirium, when the light danced; the one
wild act that lifted her, the despised one, above them all--made her
the supreme figure, to be glanced at by frightened women, stared at by
half-startled, half-admiring men! "Yes," she laughed; but struck by the
sound of her own voice, moved twice round the cavern nervously, and then
dropped again into her old position.

As they carried him away he had laughed at her--like a hound that he
was; he who had praised her for her spirit, and incited her revenge
against others; he who had taught her to strike when she was insulted;
and it was only fit he should reap what he had sown. She was what he,
what other men, had made her. And what was she now? What had she been
once?

She tried to recall her childhood: the man and woman who might have
been her father and mother; who fought and wrangled over her precocious
little life; abused or caressed her as she sided with either; and then
left her with a circus t