ough the timber, flashing their teeth like
bayonets. It's a wonderful sound on a hot, clear day--that wild,
keen singing of the saws, like the cry of a live thing fighting and
conquering. Up from the fresh-cut lumber in the yards there came a smell
like the juice of apples, and the sawdust, as you thrust your hand into
it, was as cool and soft as the leaves of a clove-flower in the dew. On
these days the town was always still. It looked sleeping, and you saw
the heat quivering up from the wooden walls and the roofs of cedar
shingles as though the houses were breathing."

Here he paused, still intent on the shaking sunshine. Then he turned to
the others as if suddenly aware that he had been talking to them. Shon
was about to speak, but Pierre threw a restraining glance, and, instead,
they all looked through the doorway and beyond. In the settlement below
they saw the effect that Wendling had described. The houses breathed. A
grasshopper went clacking past, a dog at the door snapped up a fly; but
there seemed no other life of day. Wendling nodded his head towards the
distance. "It was quiet, like that. I stood and watched the mills and
the yards, and listened to the saws, and looked at the great slide,
and the logs on the river: and I said ever to myself that it was all
mine--all. Then I turned to a big house on the hillock beyond the
cedars, whose windows were open, with a cool dusk lying behind them.
More than all else, I loved to think I owned that house and what was in
it.... She was a beautiful woman. And she used to sit in a room facing
the mill--though the house fronted another way--thinking of me, I did
not doubt, and working at some delicate needle-stuff. There never had
been a sharp word between us, save when I quarrelled bitterly with
her brother, and he left the mill and went away. But she got over that
mostly, though the lad's name was, never mentioned between us. That day
I was so hungry for the sight of her that I got my field-glass--used to
watch my vessels and rafts making across the bay--and trained it on the
window where I knew she sat. I thought, it would amuse her, too, when I
went back at night, if I told her what she had been doing. I laughed
to myself at the thought of it as I adjusted the glass.... I looked....
There was no more laughing.... I saw her, and in front of her a man,
with his back half on me. I could not recognise him, though at the
instant I thought he was something familiar. I failed