a bird's note in the still air,
and looking up she saw a brown song-sparrow perched in an upper branch
of the thorn above the grave. She stood a minute listening to his small
solitary song; then she rejoined the trail and began to mount the hill
to the pine-wood.

Thus far she had been impelled by the blind instinct of flight; but each
step seemed to bring her nearer to the realities of which her feverish
vigil had given only a shadowy image. Now that she walked again in a
daylight world, on the way back to familiar things, her imagination
moved more soberly. On one point she was still decided: she could not
remain at North Dormer, and the sooner she got away from it the better.
But everything beyond was darkness.

As she continued to climb the air grew keener, and when she passed from
the shelter of the pines to the open grassy roof of the Mountain the
cold wind of the night before sprang out on her. She bent her shoulders
and struggled on against it for a while; but presently her breath
failed, and she sat down under a ledge of rock overhung by shivering
birches. From where she sat she saw the trail wandering across the
bleached grass in the direction of Hamblin, and the granite wall of the
Mountain falling away to infinite distances. On that side of the ridge
the valleys still lay in wintry shadow; but in the plain beyond the sun
was touching village roofs and steeples, and gilding the haze of smoke
over far-off invisible towns.

Charity felt herself a mere speck in the lonely circle of the sky. The
events of the last two days seemed to have divided her forever from
her short dream of bliss. Even Harney's image had been blurred by that
crushing experience: she thought of him as so remote from her that he
seemed hardly more than a memory. In her fagged and floating mind only
one sensation had the weight of reality; it was the bodily burden of
her child. But for it she would have felt as rootless as the whiffs of
thistledown the wind blew past her. Her child was like a load that held
her down, and yet like a hand that pulled her to her feet. She said to
herself that she must get up and struggle on....

Her eyes turned back to the trail across the top of the Mountain, and
in the distance she saw a buggy against the sky. She knew its antique
outline, and the gaunt build of the old horse pressing forward with
lowered head; and after a moment she recognized the heavy bulk of the
man who held the reins. The buggy was fo