heart. She scarcely knew that her
limbs were stiff and that her body ached with cold. Her spirit was
aroused. She could not go and take Philip as her father had taken the
one he loved. But there were ways; when had a woman ever failed, in
love, of finding them? She set herself to thinking, planning,
scheming, while she walked swiftly to and fro before the tents. And
presently she stopped her pacing, and looked curiously around her.
There had come a subtle alteration in the aspect of the night. A
shivering freshness had crept insensibly into the air. Leaves and
grass and the very air appeared to be astir, though the silence and
the darkness were as before. She looked up eagerly at the sky, and saw
that the stars were pale. It was not yet the dawn; it was only the
passing of the night. But the dawn was near. The dawn! The dawn!

She did not wish Seth to find her there. He would ask questions,
staring at her. She crept stealthily back into her tent, and lay
there, shaking with cold, to wait for the noise that Huntington would
make as he sought for live embers in the ashes of the fire.

* * * * *

Once out of the mountains and in the foothills, she rode far ahead of
Seth and Claire, impatient at the slow progress necessitated by the
difficulties of the pack horses. Late in the afternoon she found
herself at a fork of the road with which she was familiar. A little
way up the less-used of the two branches there was a glade where
columbines grew in extraordinary profusion. She had gathered armloads
of them there, and seemed scarcely to have touched the edge of that
wild garden where nature had been seized with a prodigal impulse. And
now, rather to be doing something than to await in irritation for Seth
and Claire, she turned her pony's head and rode toward the glade. In
five minutes she was fording a little stream, beyond which the road
rose slightly to cross the shoulder of a hill, and dipped again to run
in a sharp curve along the margin of the glade. She took the rise at a
gallop, sped down the other slope, and at the curve of the road reined
up her horse with a startled cry. She had come suddenly upon a team
hitched at the side of the road,--the sorrels and the trap in which
Philip Haig had driven her to Huntington's that terrible evening.

For a moment she was bereft of thought and feeling. At that very
instant she had been thinking of him; what instant was she not
thinking o