ly! That blessed inexperience and sheer imagination of
youth enabling it to hope in a large, vague way when to hope for
any definite and real thing would be impossible.

She cleaned her tan low shoes with branches of fern and grass,
put them on. It is impossible to account for the peculiarities
of physical vanity. Probably no one was ever born who had not
physical vanity of some kind; Susan's was her feet and ankles.
Not her eyes, nor her hair, nor her contour, nor her skin, nor
her figure, though any or all of these might well have been her
pleasure. Of them she never thought in the way of pride or
vanity. But of her feet and ankles she was both proud and
vain--in a reserved, wholly unobtrusive way, be it said, so
quietly that she had passed unsuspected. There was reason for
this shy, secret self-satisfaction, so amusing in one otherwise
self-unconscious. Her feet were beautifully formed and the
curves of her instep and ankle were beautiful. She gave more
attention now to the look of her shoes and of her stockings than
to all the rest of this difficult woodland toilet. She then put
on the sailor hat, fastened the collar to her garter, slipped
the handkerchiefs into the legs of her stockings. Carrying her
underclothes, ready to roll them into a ball should she meet
anyone, she resumed her journey into that rocky wilderness. She
was sore, she had pains that were the memories of the worst
horrors of her hideous dream, but up in her strong, healthy
body, up through her strong young soul, surged joy of freedom
and joy of hope. Compared with what her lot had been until such
a few brief days before, this lot of friendless wanderer in the
wilderness was dark indeed. But she was comparing it with the
monstrous dream from which it was the awakening. She was almost
happy--and madly hungry.

An enormous bowlder, high above her and firmly fixed in the
spine of the hill, invited as a place where she could see
without being seen, could hide securely until darkness came
again. She climbed to the base of it, found that she might reach
the top by stepping from ledge to ledge with the aid of the
trees growing so close around it that some of their boughs
seemed rooted in its weather-dented cliffs. She dragged herself
upward the fifty or sixty feet, glad of the difficulties because
they would make any pursuer feel certain she had not gone that
way. After perhaps an hour she came upon a flat surface where
soil had form