s pain.
They did not find his body until spring, and then Cosme's letter to
Sheila lay wet and withered in his pocket.

CHAPTER XIII

LONELINESS

The first misery of loneliness takes the form of a restless inability to
concentrate. It is as if the victim wanted to escape from himself. After
Cosme's departure Sheila prowled about the silent cabin, began this bit
of work and that, dropped it, found herself staring vaguely, listening,
waiting, and nervously shook herself into activity again. She tried to
whistle, but it seemed like somebody else's music and frightened her
ears. At dusk she fastened sacking across the uncurtained windows,
lighted both Cosme's lamps, bringing the second from her bedroom, and
heaped up a dancing and jubilant fire upon the hearth. In the midst of
this illumination she sat, very stiff and still, in the angular
elk-hide-covered chair, and knitted her hands together on her knee. Her
mind was now intensely active; memories, thoughts, plans, fancies racing
fast and furious like screen pictures across her brain. And they seemed
to describe themselves in loud whispers. She had difficulty in keeping
these voices from taking possession of her tongue.

"I don't want to talk to myself," she murmured, and glanced over
her shoulder.

A man has need of his fellows for a shield. Man is man's shelter from
all the storm of unanswered questions. Where am I? What am I? Why am
I?--No reply. No reassuring double to take away the ghost-sense of self,
that unseen, intangible aura of personality in which each of us moves as
in a cloud. In the souls of some there is an ever-present Man God who
will forever save them from this supreme experience. Sheila's religion,
vague, conventional, childish, faltered away from her soul. Except for
her fire, which had a sort of sympathy of life and warmth and motion, she
was unutterably alone. And she was beginning to suffer from the second
misery of solitude--a sense of being many personalities instead of one.
She seemed to be entertaining a little crowd of confused and
argumentative Sheilas. To silence them she fixed her mind on her
immediate problem.

She tried to draw Hilliard close to her heart. She had an honest hunger
for his warm and graceful beauty, for his young strength, but this
natural hunger continually shocked her. She tried not to remember the
smoothness of his neck as her half-conscious hands had slipped away from
it that afternoon when he raised her