d alluring by comparison. Curiously enough, she
did not blame her brother now; neither did she blame Jack Fyfe.

She told herself that in first seeking the line of least resistance she
had manifested weakness, that since her present problem was indirectly
the outgrowth of that original weakness, she would be weak no more. So
she tried to meet her husband as if nothing had happened, in which she
succeeded outwardly very well indeed, since Fyfe himself chose to ignore
any change in their mutual attitude.

She busied herself about the house that forenoon, seeking deliberately a
multitude of little tasks to occupy her hands and her mind.

But when lunch was over, she was at the end of her resources. Jack
Junior settled in his crib for a nap. Fyfe went away to that area back
of the camp where arose the crash of falling trees and the labored
puffing of donkey engines. She could hear faint and far the voices of
the falling gangs that cried: "Tim-ber-r-r-r." She could see on the
bank, a little beyond the bunkhouse and cook-shack, the big roader
spooling up the cable that brought string after string of logs down to
the lake. Rain or sun, happiness or sorrow, the work went on. She found
it in her heart to envy the sturdy loggers. They could forget their
troubles in the strain of action. Keyed as she was to that high pitch,
that sense of their unremitting activity, the ravaging of the forest
which produced the resources for which she had sold herself irritated
her. She was very bitter when she thought that.

She longed for some secluded place to sit and think, or try to stop
thinking. And without fully realizing the direction she took, she walked
down past the camp, crossed the skid-road, stepping lightly over main
line and haul-back at the donkey engineer's warning, and went along the
lake shore.

A path wound through the belt of brush and hardwood that fringed the
lake. Not until she had followed this up on the neck of a little
promontory south of the bay, did she remember with a shock that she was
approaching the place where Monohan had begged her to meet him. She
looked at her watch. Two-thirty. She sought the shore line for sight of
a boat, wondering if he would come in spite of her refusal. But to her
great relief she saw no sign of him. Probably he had thought better of
it, had seen now as she had seen then that no good and an earnest chance
of evil might come of such a clandestine meeting, had taken her stand as
final