lexity for a
guiding light. Afterwards, when understanding was too late, Grace partly
understood.

"Mr. Cartwright is not a ruffian." she said coldly.

"I suppose you're taking the proper line, and you'd be rather noble,
only you're not sincere. You don't like Cartwright and know he doesn't
like you. All the same, it's not important. We were talking about
getting home, and since the boys have not come for us we had better
start."

The loon had flown away and nothing broke the surface of the lake; the
shadows had got longer and driven back the light. Thin mist drifted
about the islands, the green glow behind the trunks was fading, and it
would soon be dark.

"In winter, the big timber wolves prowl about the woods," Barbara
remarked. "Horrible, savage brutes! I expect you saw the heads at the
packer's house. Still, one understands they stay North until the frost
begins."

She got up, and when they set off Grace looked regretfully across the
lake, for she would sooner have gone home on board the fishing bateau.
She was puzzled. The bays on the lake were numerous, and islands dotted
the winding reaches, but it was strange the young men had gone to the
wrong spot. They knew the lake and had told Barbara where to meet them.
In the meantime, however, the important thing was to get home.

Darkness crept across the woods, and as she stumbled along the uneven
trail Grace got disturbed. She felt the daunting loneliness, the quiet
jarred her nerve. The pines looked ghostly in the gloom. They were
ragged and strangely stiff, it looked as if their branches never moved,
and the dark gaps between the trunks were somehow forbidding.

Grace did not like Canada. Her cultivation was artificial, but Canada
was primitive and stern. In the towns, one found inventions that
lightened labor, and brought to the reach of all a physical comfort that
in England only the rich enjoyed, but the contrasts were sharp. One left
one's hotel, with its very modern furniture, noisy elevators and
telephones, and plunged into the wilderness where all was as it had been
from the beginning. Grace shrank from primitive rudeness and hated
adventure. Living by rule she distrusted all she did not know. She
thought it strange that Barbara, who feared nothing, let her go in
front.

They came to a pool. All round, the black tops of the pines cut the sky;
the water was dark and sullen in the gloom. The trail followed its edge
and when a loon's wild cry rang ac