oth hurt and frightened
now, and the instinct that had urged her to fly was as simple and
primitive as that which urges a wounded animal to hide.

Indeed, if you could have seen her after she had swung her paddle
inboard, sitting there, gripping the gunwales with both hands, panting,
her wide eyes dry, you might easily have thought of some defenseless
wild thing cowering in a momentary shelter, listening for the baying of
pursuing hounds.

He didn't love her any more, that was what he had said. For what was the
thing he had so cheerfully described himself as cured of, what were the
symptoms he had enumerated as if he had been talking about a
disease--the obsession with her, the inability to get her further away
than the middle ground of his thoughts, and then only temporarily; the
necessity of saying everything he said and doing everything he did, with
reference to her; the fact that his mind could focus itself sharply on
nothing in the world but just herself?--What was all that but the
veritable description, though in hostile terms, of the love he had
promised to feel for her till death should--part them; of the very love
she felt for him, this moment stronger than ever?

Recurrent waves of the panic broke over her, during which she would
catch up her paddle again and drive ahead, blindly, without any
conscious knowledge of where she was going. And in the intervals, she
drifted.

The relief of tears didn't come to her until she saw, just ahead, the
island where, for two paradisiacal weeks, she and Rodney had made their
camp. Here she beached her canoe and went ashore; crept into a little
natural shelter under a jutting rock, where they had lain one day while,
for three hours, a violent unheralded storm had whipped the lake to
lather. The heap of hemlock branches he had cut for a couch for them was
still there.

At the end of half an hour, she observed with a sort of apathetic
satisfaction, that the weather conditions of their former visit were
going to be repeated now--a sudden darkness, a shriek of wind, a wild
squall flashing across the surface of the little lake, and a driving
rain so thick that small as the lake was, it veiled the shore of it.

She watched it for an hour before it occurred to her to wonder what
Rodney would be doing--whether he'd have discovered her absence from the
house and begun to worry about her. She told herself that he
wouldn't--that he'd sit there until he finished his book, or until