hid in a wood that stretched for half a mile or so upon a rising
ground. In front of the house, not far from the lake, a man was lying
asleep upon the ground, a rough felt hat drawn over his eyes.

Like the house, the man seemed dilapidated also: a slovenly, ill-dressed,
demoralized figure he looked, even with his face covered. He seemed in a
deep sleep. Wild ducks settled on the lake not far from him with a swish
and flutter; a coyote ran past, veering as it saw the recumbent figure; a
prairie hen rustled by with a shrill cluck, but he seemed oblivious to
all. If asleep, he was evidently dreaming, for now and then he started, or
his body twitched and a muttering came from beneath the hat.

The battered house, the absence of barn or stable or garden, or any token
of thrift or energy, marked the man as an excrescence in this theatre of
hope and fruitful toil. It all belonged to some degenerate land, some
exhausted civilization, not to this field of vigor where life rang like
silver.

So the man lay for hour upon hour. He slept as though he had been upon a
long journey in which the body was worn to helplessness. Or was it that
sleep of the worn-out spirit which, tortured by remembrance and remorse,
at last sinks into the depths where the conscious vexes the unconscious--a
little of fire, a little of ice, and now and then the turn of the screw?

The day marched nobly on toward evening, growing out of its blue and
silver into a pervasive golden gleam; the bare, grayish houses on the
prairie were transformed into miniature palaces of light. Presently a girl
came out of the woods behind, looking at the neglected house with a
half-pitying curiosity. She carried in one hand a fishing-rod which had
been telescoped till it was no bigger than a cane; in the other she
carried a small fishing-basket. Her father's shooting and fishing camp was
a few miles away by a lake of greater size than this which she approached.
She had tired of the gay company in camp, brought up for sport from beyond
the American border where she also belonged, and she had come to explore
the river running into this reedy lake. She turned from the house and came
nearer to the lake, shaking her head, as though compassionating the poor
folk who lived there. She was beautiful. Her hair was brown, going to
tawny, but in this soft light which enwrapped her she was in a sort of
topaz flame. As she came on, suddenly she stopped as though transfixed.
She saw the man