tment, the booming of an owl was a magic
portent, the shadowed wall of granite was a turreted castle of
mysteries, vague in the starlight, and the very stars themselves huddled
down on him excitingly. He was in a world of the unreal, and must do an
unreal thing. He stumbled blindly back to camp. He was surprised to find
Mrs. Laithe as he had left her, still drooping against the rough-barked
tree, weak, submissive, overborne. He touched her arm gently to recall
her from some troubled distance. She looked at him with eyes unseeing at
first.

"Isn't it bedtime?" he suggested.

She smiled and stood up to shrug away the spell of her dreaming. She
spoke with such clear strength of tone that he was at once reassured of
her vigor.

"Yes, it's sleeping time--in a moment. I haven't said much to you, but
there's really little to say. You feel that you must go?"

"How could I stay here--after that?"

She repressed a sudden spasm of wild, weeping laughter that threatened
to overcome her.

"And you'll not come back?" She waited breathless.

"There isn't much chance of it."

"You dear, dear fool!" was on her lips, but she held back the words and
said very quietly:

"Go out, then, and live as you must. Only don't let life cow you. Don't
ever fear that living is intricate or hard or tragic--a thing to be gone
about warily. The wary people make the same mistakes as the careless
ones, and feel them ten times more. Don't be afraid to dream--afraid to
believe. I'm glad I've dreamed every dream of mine--false or true. Never
be afraid to want." She turned half away as if to go, but halted, and he
thought she had grown suddenly weak.

"You're going----"

"To-morrow, I'd thought--the sooner the better."

"Ah, but that's so soon. Can't we have one more day here? One more day
to think of it?"

"I've thought of it all winter, days and nights as well; but I'd like
another day--" He watched her longingly as she went beyond the
firelight.

"Not a day to think about it," he called softly--"a day to forget."

They made it a day of forgetting, as he had said. In the morning they
planned to ride, and their spirits were such as they rode off that Ben
was moved to regard them knowingly, as one who had taken a fling at life
in his time.

The day long they rode or rambled, talking of all but obvious
things--making it, indeed, a day of forgetting and a day to remember.
Deep in the woman's heart stirred an instinct of primal coquetry, an