the thatched roof of the lean-to.
She looked at her hands--they were dirty, the nails black from
scrambling over logs. At that moment she would eagerly have exchanged
her jewels for a boudoir and a bath. Her jewels--they were gone in
the fire. Gone, too, before it began were a packet of letters and a
tell-tale photograph! This fact was the only one in her desolation
that comforted her.

Then came moments when her surroundings became exasperating; what
fresh misery would she be forced to endure--days worse, perhaps, than
the one she had just passed through might follow. If she could only
fly! But where? Out in that wilderness? She had sense enough left to
know that had she stolen out beyond sight of the lean-to she would
have been hopelessly lost. She did not know, however, all that it
meant; the terror that would await her--the suffering, stumbling
blindly in a circle--hungry, yet afraid to eat had she had
food--thirsty, yet not daring to stop even at a clear spring. Her
body beaten and bruised--her mind weak from fear--half naked--her
hair dishevelled, her scalp bleeding; reeling toward any quarter which
seemed like the way out. All this, had she but known it, had happened
to the three men sleeping in the lean-to: the trapper, when he was
eighteen, found barely breathing after twelve days of torture, the
dog chain which he had wrapped round his waist after starting a deer,
having deflected the needle of his compass; Holcomb, picking his way
out along the shores of a chain of lakes, with no matches and but a
handful of cartridges; and the Clown, blind drunk on Jamaica ginger
and peppermint essence, in a country whose unfamiliarity nearly caused
his death. A man without his stomach and physique would have died; by
some miracle he lived to reach Morrison's unaided--he wanted a drink.

And yet there was not a portion of this wilderness that could
lose these three men now, past masters as they were in the art of
wood-craft. Yes--it was just as well that The Lady of Big Shanty knew
none of these things. Miserable as she was, here, she was protected.
Her hand went out unconsciously and rested for a moment on her
husband. Again she fell asleep--a troubled sleep--in which she dreamed
she confronted a face with sinister eyes and hot cheeks from which she
fled in terror. When she awoke she looked out into a blanket of mist.
In the breaking dawn the surface of Bear Pond lay like a mirror. The
others were still asleep. The fire i