uld ever be as
it was yesterday. I think at first she referred only to the material and
larger phenomena, and did not confound this revelation of the insecurity
of the universe with her experience of man. Yet the fact also remained
that to the conservative, correct, and, as she believed, secure
condition to which she had been approximating, all her relations were
rudely shaken and upset. It really seemed to this simple-minded young
woman that the revolutionary disturbance of settled conditions might
have as Providential an origin as the "Divine Right" of which she had
heard so much.

CHAPTER IV

In her desire to be alone and to evade the now significant attentions
of Emile, she took advantage of the bustle that followed the hurried
transfer of furniture and articles from the house to escape through the
garden to the outlying fields. Striking into one of the dusty lanes that
she remembered, she wandered on for half an hour until her progress and
meditation were suddenly arrested. She had come upon a long chasm or
crack in the soil, full twenty feet wide and as many in depth, crossing
her path at right angles. She did not remember having seen it before;
the track of wheels went up to its precipitous edge; she could see
the track on the other side, but the hiatus remained, unbridged and
uncovered. It was not there yesterday. She glanced right and left; the
fissure seemed to extend, like a moat or ditch, from the distant road to
the upland between her and the great wheat valley below, from which she
was shut off. An odd sense of being in some way a prisoner confronted
her. She drew back with an impatient start, and perhaps her first real
sense of indignation. A voice behind her, which she at once recognized,
scarcely restored her calmness.

"You can't get across there, miss."

She turned. It was the young inventor from the wheat ranch, on horseback
and with a clean face. He had just ridden out of the grain on the same
side of the chasm as herself.

"But you seem to have got over," she said bluntly.

"Yes, but it was further up the field. I reckoned that the split might
be deeper but not so broad in the rock outcrop over there than in the
adobe here. I found it so and jumped it."

He looked as if he might--alert, intelligent, and self-contained. He
lingered a moment, and then continued:--

"I'm afraid you must have been badly shaken and a little frightened up
there before the chimneys came down?"

"No," she w