Surely too late, for he was in the position of her protector,
and she would have to assume that he was a gentleman; and how is a girl
by that prairie camp-fire going to say just how much room her person
shall occupy? Then how shall she set safe bounds? With the darkness
closing in around her she felt trapped.

Her wits hard-pressed by this paradoxical plight, she looked with new
longing at the shack. She felt that if she were on the other side of
that threshold, and it were hers by right, she could stand behind it
with some assurance of power against him, some dependence in forces not
her own. For a door-sill is definite, and on it rises a formal
spectre; but the way to a woman's heart is not so. Out here there were
no set bounds; nothing to give pause at a distance showing the first
and fatal step: no line in nature which becomes evident before it has
been passed. Without it the moral dead-line was too close. Oh! if
that shack were only hers--the rights of its lockless door.

But it was not hers. Thus Janet's imagination battered at the doors of
Home, scarcely knowing what she thought, but taking mental action,
nevertheless, in the face of circumstance and the quick speech of
things. It seemed to her--afterwards--that never till that moment had
she seen the full nature of Home. That she could see any of its
features, even for a moment, in a shack so frail that a boot could
break it, did not seem reasonable, even to her; but the strength of a
house is not all in locks and bars. She had caught the depth of the
man's first charmed look at her. Even a shack can excuse one from the
scene, extinguish the light of beauty, and then say with the voice of
Society--keep out. Thus things do not so easily and gradually come to
an issue. But before her was only the prospect of her open presence,
without screen or barrier or warning sign. And she, on her part, had
not failed to note that, besides his straightness and look of strength,
there was something of virile charm. What a terrible thing to be a
woman! So, having turned instinctively to the shack, and recoiled from
it, and then, with nothing else in sight, returned to it with the
imagination of despair, there was nothing left but to turn about and
stand with equal bafflement before the closed secrets of his soul.

As if by a deeper instinct, rewarding her efforts, she saw in him
certain abilities for evil--deep, deliberate, and daring. He had quite
deliberate