ut feel, was as impossible for her as it
would have been to disengage her senses from their tranced
concentration and restore them to the composed serenity of the past.

It was not the sudden crumbling of a character, the collapse of a
structure reared on a foundation of careful training. It was a logical
growth, forced by the developing process of an environment with which
that character was in harmony. Before she reached the level where she
could surrender herself, forgetful of the rites imposed by law,
unshocked by her lover's brutality, she had been losing every ingrafted
and inherited modification that had united her with the world in which
she had been an exotic. The trials of the trail that would have dried
the soul and broken the mettle of a girl whose womanhood was less rich,
drew from hers the full measure of its strength. Every day had made
her less a being of calculated, artificial reserves, of inculcated
modesties, and more a human animal, governed by instincts that belonged
to her age and sex. She was normal and chaste and her chastity had
made her shrink from the man whose touch left her cold, and yield to
the one to whom her first antagonism had been first response. When she
had given Courant her kiss she had given herself. There was no need
for intermediary courtship. After that vacillations of doubt and
conscience ended. The law of her being was all that remained.

She moved on with the men, dust-grimed, her rags held together with
pins and lacings of deer hide. She performed her share of the work
with automatic thoroughness, eating when the hour came, sleeping on the
ground under the stars, staggering up in the deep-blue dawn and
buckling her horse's harness with fingers that fatigue made clumsy.
She was more silent than ever before, often when the old man addressed
her making no reply. He set down her abstraction to grief over David.
When he tried to cheer her, her absorbed preoccupation gave place to
the old restlessness, and once again she watched and listened. These
were her only moods--periods of musing when she rode in front of the
wagon with vacant eyes fixed on the winding seam of the trail, and
periods of nervous agitation when she turned in her saddle to sweep the
road behind her and ordered him to build the night fire high and bright.

The old servant was puzzled. Something foreign in her, an inner
vividness of life, a deeper current of vitality, told him that this was
not a