us. Our day
is--is short at best, but the--the eternity! And you, dear, faithful
Cilla! You, with your blessed love, how will it be when I have done what
I must do? I must go to--to father and tell the truth, and then----"

"I know," Priscilla had said. "Doctor Travers told me what would follow.
I shall not be here for him to suffer for; I am going----"

"Where, my precious friend?"

"To--the Place Beyond the Winds! You do not understand. You cannot; no
one can follow me; but I cannot bear the hurting blasts any more. I want
the In-Place."

Then it was over, and now she was back in her lonely rooms. She packed
her few, dear possessions, and toward morning lay down upon her bed. At
daylight she departed, after settling her affairs with the night clerk
and leaving no directions that any one could follow.

"It is business," she had cautioned, and the sleepy fellow nodded his
head.

The rest did not matter. She would travel to the port from which the
boats sailed to Kenmore. Any boat would do; any time. Some morning,
perhaps, at four o'clock, if the passage had not been too rough, she
would find herself on the shabby little wharf with the pink morning light
about her, and the red-rock road stretching on before.

Then Priscilla, like a miser, gripped her purse. Never before had money
held any power over her, but the hundreds she had saved were precious to
her now. Her father's doors were still, undoubtedly, closed to her. She
could not be a burden to the two men living in Master Farwell's small
home. There was, to be sure, Mary McAdam! By and by, perhaps, when the
hurt was less and she could trust herself more, she would go to the White
Fish Lodge and beg for employment; but until then----

The morning Priscilla departed, Ledyard, unequal to any further strain,
was called upon to bear several. By his plate, at the breakfast table,
lay a scrawled envelope that he recognized at once as a report from
Tough Pine.

"What's up now?" muttered he. "This thing isn't due for--three weeks
yet."

Then he read, laboriously, the crooked lines:

I give up job. Dirty work. Money--bad money. I take no more--or I be
damned! He better man--than you was; you bad and evil, for fun--he grow
big and white. No work for bad man--friend now to good mens.

Pine.

"The devil!" muttered Ledyard; but oddly enough the letter raised, rather
than lowered, his mental temperature. Those ill-looking epistles of
Pine's had nauseated hi