; she
fought it, but the decision, the feeling of his unhappiness should she
give him final rejection, roosted on her pillow. It had never come to
an engagement; it had been only an understanding; but she thought of
dreadful things, even of his possible suicide, whenever she
contemplated giving him the final blow.

The old-fashioned Waddington house stood on a big Spanish lot far out
in the Mission. There was ground to spare; enough so that its original
owners had room to plant trees without shading light from the windows.
As they walked into the deep shadows, her voice took on an intonation
like a suppressed sob.

"It is a comfort now to have said it, and it's a new life to have you
for support. Oh, Bertram, what a big, strong friend you are! Be good
to me, won't you?"

She had stopped; in the shadows the clouded moon of her face looked up
into his.

"Oh, won't you be good to me?"

He slipped his arm about her; and suddenly he kissed her.

She suffered his kiss for only a moment; then she moved away. He let
her go, and she rushed ahead to the door. When he reached the step,
she had faced about.

"Consider my _feelings_, Bert Chester," she said; and the screen door
slammed.

CHAPTER XIII

Just where the Santa Eliza trail commanded sight of the main travelled
road, Eleanor sat on a rock watching the hill-shadows lengthen on the
valley below, watching a mauve haze deepen on the dark-green tops of
redwood trees. The time was approaching when she must hurry back to
Mrs. Goodyear's bungalow for a dinner which she dreaded. Three weeks
of perplexity had bred in her a shrinking from people. She had found
excuse to wander away alone.

That lazy spring of the North woods, so like to early fall in other
climates, had given her at first the healing of spirit which she
needed. She wandered hither and yon as her fancy led her, following
this trail, pushing into that opening in the chapparal. She had come
out upon the Santa Eliza trail and gained sight of the road before she
realized with a kind of inner shame the way in which her feet of
flesh had been tending, the direction in which she had been turning
her eyes of the spirit.

Three miles away on the summit of the next ridge was the Masters
ranch, and there rested the centre of her soul-storm. Bertram Chester,
she knew by chance, was spending the week-end with the Masters.

She stopped by the rock, then; and immediately nature went out of her
heart and the