from her. But she was
beginning to learn them now. She was having her first glimpse of life,
life stripped of all delusion, stark and naked, the relentless reality
that it was.

Fear was no stranger to these forests. Its presence, in every turn of
the trail, filled her with awe. A single misstep, a little instant of
hesitation in a crisis, might precipitate her a thousand feet down the
canyon to her death. Dead trees swayed, threatening to fall; snow
slides roared and rumbled on the far steeps; the quagmire sucked with
greedy lips, the trail wandered dimly,--as if it were trying to decoy
her away into the fastnesses where the wilderness might claim her. No
one had to tell her how easy it would be to lose the trail, never to
find it again. The forests were endless; there were none to hear a
wanderer's cry for help. Wet matches, an accident to the food supplies,
a few nights without shelter in the dismal forest,--any of these might
spell complete and irrevocable disaster.

What had she known of Death? It was a thing to claim old people,
sometimes to take even her young friends from their games among the
flowers, but never had it been an acquaintance to hers. It was as
wholly apart from her as the beings of another planet. But here she had
come to the home of Death,--cold and fearful obliteration dwelling in
every thicket. She found herself wondering about it, now, and dreading
it with a new dread that she had never dreamed of before. The only real
emotions she had ever known were her love for Harold Lounsbury and her
grief at his absence: in these autumn woods she might easily learn all
the others. She had never known true loneliness; here, except for her
fiance's uncle with whom she had never felt on common ground and two
paid employees--the latter, she told herself, did not count--she was
as much alone as if she had been cast upon an uninhabited sphere.
Already she knew something of the great malevolence that is the eternal
tone of the wilderness, the lurking peril that is the North.

This new view influenced her attitude toward Bill. At first she had
felt no interest in him whatever. Of a class that does not enter into a
basis of equality with personal employees, to her he had seemed in the
same category with a new house servant or chauffeur. He had been hired
to do her service; he was either a bad servant or a good one, and from
her he would receive kindness and patronage, but never real feeling or