d said
to him,--"You are looking for your wife?"

Heldon bowed his head. The other threw open the door of the hut. "Come
in here," he said. They entered. Pierre pointed to a woman's hat on
the table. "Do you know that"? he asked, huskily, for he was moved. But
Heldon only nodded dazedly. Pierre continued: "I was to have met Tom
Liffey here--to-night. He is not here. You hoped--I suppose--to see your
wife in your--home. She is not there. He left a word on paper for me.
I have torn it up. Writing is the enemy of man. But I know where he is
gone. I know also where your wife has gone."

Heldon's face was of a hateful paleness.... They passed out into the
night.

"Where are you going"? Heldon said.

"To God's Playground, if we can get there."

"To God's Playground? To the glacier-top? You are mad."

"No, but he and she were mad. Come on." Then he whispered something, and
Heldon gave a great cry, and they plunged into the woods.

In the morning the people of Little Goshen, looking towards the glacier,
saw a flag (they knew afterwards that it was crimson) flying on it. Near
it were two human figures. A miner, looking through a field-glass,
said that one figure was crouching by the flag-staff, and that it was a
woman. The other figure near was a man. As the morning wore on, they
saw upon a crag of ice below the sloping glacier two men looking upwards
towards the flag. One of them seemed to shriek out, and threw up his
hands, and made as if to rush forward; but the other drew him back.

Heldon knew what revenge and disgrace may be at their worst. In vain he
tried to reach God's Playground. Only one man knew the way, and he was
dead upon it--with Heldon's wife: two shameless suicides.... When he
came down from the mountain the hair upon his face was white, though
that upon his head remained black as it had always been. And those
frozen figures stayed there like statues with that other crimson flag:
until, one day, a great-bodied wind swept out of the north, and, in
pity, carried them down a bottomless fissure.

But long before this happened, The Woman had fled from Little Goshen in
the night, and her house was burned to the ground.

THE FLOOD

Wendling came to Fort Anne on the day that the Reverend Ezra Badgley and
an unknown girl were buried. And that was a notable thing. The man had
been found dead at his evening meal; the girl had died on the same day;
and they were buried side by side. This caused much scan