real relation between the vast, imperturbable earth, its seas, its
forests, its mountains and its plains, its life of tree and plant and
flower and the men and women dotted on its surface? Did they belong to
each other, or were mankind only, as it were, vermin infesting the
desirable world? Did they belong to each other? It meant so much if
they did belong, and she loved to think they did. Many a time she kissed
the smooth bole of a maple or whispered to it; or laid her cheek against
a mossy rock and murmured a greeting in the spirit of a companionship as
old as the making of the world.

On the evening of this day of her destiny--carrying the story of her own
fate within its twenty-four hours--she was in a mood of detachment from
life's routine. As at a great opera, a sensitive spirit loses itself in
visions alien to the music and yet born of it, so she, lost in this
primeval scene before her, saw visions of things to be.

If Ingolby's sight came back! In her abstraction she saw him with sight
restored and by her side, and even in that joy her mind felt a hovering
sense of invasion, no definite, visible thing, but a presence which made
shadow. Suddenly oppressed by it, she turned back into the woods from
the river-bank to make for home. She had explored nearly every portion
of this river-country for miles up and down, but on this evening, lost in
her dreams, she had wandered into less familiar regions. There was no
chance of her being lost, so long as she kept near to the river, and
indeed by instinct and not by thought or calculation she made her way
about at all times. Turned homeward, she walked for about a quarter of a
mile, retreading the path by which she had come. It was growing darker,
and, being in unfamiliar surroundings, she hurried on, though she knew
well what course to take. Following the bank of the river she would have
increased her walk greatly, as the stream made a curve at a point above