ay of the mist-steaming water reminded her that she was
thirsty, but she would stop for nothing now. She knew herself for a
coward at last, guilty of a cowardice hideously selfish. She had planned
her act to be remote, secret, undiscoverable. But now she faced squarely
the grief her loss would be to others.

But the sting would pass. And she had her own right--her own obligation
to meet. She had killed--she had killed her love--and she could not
live. There was service she might have performed through the years, but
others would perform it now, quite as acceptably. A gnat dropping from
the ephemeral human swarm could be nothing but a gnat the less. She no
longer pretended to call it the hardest thing. "But it's the next
hardest," she pleaded to herself. Her lips quivered, but she stilled the
spasm with a gust of fierce resolving to be done with the thing quickly.

The shelving bank along which the stream had wound now fell away, and
she could dimly make out a draw between two hills where she might
ascend. She chose a place of broken stone and loose gravel for Cooney to
clamber out, so that he might leave no sign even to a searcher who had
come this far. Then, ascending the draw a little distance, she turned
and sent him up the side of the lesser hill. The mist still shut her in,
but she could make out that the woods were denser on this hill.

Cooney made his way through a growth of the thick, wet buck brush, then
between white files of the quaking aspen, and at last into the heavier
wooded forest where his feet slipped and slid on the yielding pine
needles as he climbed. The hill lengthened before her in gradual
ascents, broken by terraces, and the way was rough with bowlders and
fallen trees and the clutching tangle of undergrowth. But the mist,
receding before her, revealed aisles of the wood farther on that allured
her. She would be thorough. Ahead of her were ruddy, yellow hints of the
sun, striking down through the green arches of the forest.

At last she saw that she had reached the summit of the hill. "It is the
place," she said, then reined in and dismounted by a clump of bushes.
She found herself stiffened by the cold, and a sudden fear of failing
force seized her. She stamped on the ground until she felt warmth in her
feet again, and the stirred blood mounting through her. She drew a great
breath and straightened her body with a consciousness of its strength
and wealth of life. "It is the place," she repeate