the place where she had been crouching; she saw him put his hand upon
the patch of dead ferns which her body had crushed flat, and knew that
he found it still warm. She even held up her face, as though she were
giving him her lips--she reached out her arms to him--when she saw him
rise from an examination of her foot-prints in the mold, smiling his
slow, infinitely grave smile as he nodded his head over what he had
seen.

Back over the path she had come she followed the dancing point of his
lantern, sometimes almost upon him, sometimes lagging far behind when
he stopped and strained his ears for her. All recollection of the
night before was gone from her mind, wiped out as utterly as though it
had never existed. Nothing but a great gladness possessed her, a joy
that amounted almost to mischievous glee whenever he stood still a
moment and listened.

Not until she had waited many minutes after he stooped and slipped the
card beneath the door did she come out from the cover of the woods.
But she raced forward madly then, and flung the door open, and stooped
for it where it lay white against the floor.

All the mischievous glee went from her face in that next moment. Bit
by bit it faded before the advance of that same strained whiteness
that had marred it, hours before. All the wistfulness that made her
face so childlike, all the hunger that made the hurt in her breast
came back while she read, over and over, the words which Denny had
written for her across the back of her card, until she could repeat
them without looking at it. And even then she only half-understood
what they meant. Once she opened the door and peered out into the
blackness, searching for the lantern that had disappeared.

"Why--why he's gone! He came to tell me that he was going away," she
murmured, dully. And then, still more dully:

"And I didn't tell him I was sorry. I've let him go without even
telling him how sorry I was--for the hurt upon his chin!"

Perhaps it was the silence that made her turn; perhaps she simply
turned with no thought or reason at all, but she faced slowly about at
that moment, just in time to see John Anderson nod and smile happily
at something he alone could see--just in time to hear him sigh softly
once, before his arms went slack upon his work-bench and his head
drooped forward above them.

The bit of a card fluttered to the floor as both her tight-clenched
fists lifted toward her throat. The softest of pitying little