lty realize that there is any such place as New
York; and San Francisco is a fable. The world seems a great bare
mountain plane; and I am hanging on to its edge by my fingertips, ready
to drop away into space. Can you account for such impressions?"

"Easily, if I chose. May I tell you something?"

"What is it?"

"I've half a mind to run away with you."

Now, as Dr. Earle was a rather young and a very handsome man, had been
very kind, and was now looking at her with eyes actually moistened with
tears, a sudden sense of being on the edge of a pitfall overcame Mrs.
Hastings; and she turned pale and red alternately. Yet, with the
instinct of a pure woman, to avoid recognizing an ugly thought, she
answered with a laugh as gay as she could make it.

"If you were a witch, and offered me half of your broomstick to New
York, I don't know but I should take it;--that is, if there was room on
it anywhere for Jack."

"There wouldn't be," said the Doctor, and said no more.

The old fever seemed to have returned that afternoon. The hills glared
so that Mrs. Hastings closed the cabin door to shut out the burning
vision. The ground-squirrels, thinking from the silence that no one was
within, ran up the mahogany tree at the side, and scampered over the
canvas roof in glee. One, more intent on gain than the rest, invaded
Jack's outside kitchen, knocking down the tin dishes with a clang, and
scattering the dirt from the turf roof over the flour-sack and the two
white plates. Every sound made her heart beat faster. Afraid of the
silence and loneliness at last, she reopened the door; and then a
rough-looking man came to the entrance, to inquire if there were any
silver leads up the ravine.

Leads? she could not say: prospectors in plenty there were.

Then he went his way, having satisfied his curiosity; and the door was
closed again. Some straggling donkeys wandered near, which were mistaken
for "Diggers;" and dreading their glittering eyes, the nervous prisoner
drew the curtain over the one little sliding window. There was nothing
to read, nothing to sew, no housekeeping duties, because no house to
keep; she was glad when the hour arrived for preparing the late
afternoon meal.

That night she dreamed that she was a skeleton lying up the canon--the
sunshine parching her naked bones; that Dr. Earle came along with a
pack-train going to the mill, and picking her up carefully, laid her on
top of a bundle of wood; that the Mexican dr