he pronounced tick of her wrist watch,
even the whisper of her own breath. It was as if she had gone to an
enchanted land, a place that lay in a great sleep that began in the
world's young days, and from which the last reaches of time it could
never waken.

Bill, standing just above her, pointed to a dash of golden across the
canyon. "That's quivering asp," he told her, "turned by the frost. It
seems good to see a bit of color in this world of dark woods. It's just
like a flash of sunshine in a storm."

She listened with some surprise. The same detail had held her gaze, the
same thought--almost the same simile--had come into her mind; but
she had hardly expected to find a love of the beautiful in this bronzed
forester. In fact, she found that a number of her preconceived ideas
were being turned topsy-turvy.

Heretofore, it seemed to her, her thought had always dwelt on the
superficialities rather than the realities of life. Her income was
pitifully small according to her standards, yet she had never had to
consider the question of food and shelter. She had known social
success, love of beauty and of art, gayety and luxury; she had had petty
discouragements and triumphs, worries and fears, but of the simple and
primitive basis of things she took no cognizance. She had never dealt
with essentials. They had always seemed outside her life.

Virginia had never lived in the shadow of Fear,--that greatest and
most potent of realities. In truth she didn't know the meaning of the
word. She had been afraid in her bed at night, she had been
apprehensive of a block's walk in the twilight, but Fear--in its true
sense--was an alien and a stranger. She had never met him in the
waste places, seen him skulking on her trail through the winter snows,
listened to his voice in the wind's wail. She didn't know the fear of
which the coyotes sang from this hill, the blind and groping dread of an
immutable destiny, the ghastly realization of impotence against a cruel
and omnipotent fate. She hadn't ever learned about it. Living a
protected life she didn't know that it existed. Food and shelter and
warmth and safety had always seemed her birthright; about her house
marched the officers of the law protecting her from evildoers; she lived
in sight of great hospitals that would open their doors to the sick and
injured and of charitable institutions that would clothe and feed the
needy: thus the world had kept its bitter truths