d
claims upon Peter's heart which came long before Beth's. And if this
Anastasie--other women too....

Beth read the letter again and then slipped it back into its envelope,
while she gazed out of the window at the pines, a frown at her brows and
two tiny lines curving downward at the corners of her lips. She was very
unhappy. But she was angry too--angry at the heliotrope woman, angry at
Peter and angrier still at herself. In that moment she forgot that she
had taken Peter Nichols without reference to what he was or had been.
She had told him that only the future mattered and now she knew that the
past was beginning to matter very much indeed.

After a while she got up, and took the heliotrope letter to the bureau
where she wrote upon the envelope rather viciously with a soft lead
pencil, "You left _this_ last night. You'd better go back to Anastasie."
Then she slipped the letter into her waist and with an air of decision
went down the stairs (the ominous parentheses still around her mouth),
and made her way with rapid footsteps toward the path through the forest
which led toward Peter's cabin.

Beth was primitive, highly honorable by instinct if not by precept, but
a creature of impulse, very much in love, who read by intuition the
intrusion of what seemed a very real danger to her happiness. If her
conscience warned her that she was transgressing the rules of polite
procedure, something stronger than a sense of propriety urged her on to
read, something stronger than mere curiosity--the impulse of
self-preservation, the impulse to preserve that which was stronger even
than self--the love of Peter Nichols.

The scrawl that she had written upon the envelope was eloquent of her
point of view, at once a taunt, a renunciation and a confession. "You
left _this_ last night. You'd better go back to Anastasie!"

It was the intention of carrying the letter to Peter's cabin and there
leaving it in a conspicuous position that now led her rapidly down the
path through the woods. Gone were the tender memories of the night
before. If this woman had had claims upon Peter Nichols's heart at the
two places with the Russian names, she had the same claims upon them
now. Beth's love and her pride waged a battle within her as she
approached the Cabin. She remembered that Peter had told her last night
that he would have a long day at the lumber camp, but as she crossed the
log-jam she found herself hoping that by some chance she would