d then Jim was forced to clear a path with his ax.
After a time he stopped behind a trunk and touched Carrie, who saw an
animal leap out from the gloom. It cleared a big fallen branch with a
flying bound, vanished almost silently in a brake of tall fern, and
shooting out with forelegs bent sprang across a thicket. Carrie
thought it hardly touched the ground. It was wonderfully swift and
graceful, and although the forest was choked with undergrowth and
rotting logs all was very quiet when the animal vanished.

"Oh," she said, "I'm glad you stopped me! I haven't seen a wild deer
before."

"They are hard to see," Jim replied. "If they're standing, they melt
into their background at a very short distance. However, I didn't like
the way that deer was going. It passed pretty close, without seeing we
were about."

Noting that the scramble had tired her, he began to rub his ax with a
sharpening stone, and Carrie mused while she got her breath. By and by
she looked up and saw his twinkling glance.

"Yes," she said, "I was thinking rather hard; I thought it was good for
me to come North. All was always just the same at the store; the dull
street, the mean frame houses, and the stale smell of groceries. There
was nothing different; you knew you would do to-morrow what you did
to-day, and you had made no progress when the reckoning came. If there
was money enough to pay the bills, you were satisfied, and sometimes
there was not. But I really mean you felt you had made no progress of
any kind; you were slipping back."

"Slipping back? I'm not sure I get that----"

"Sometimes it's hard to put you wise, but perhaps slipping back wasn't
altogether right. I meant things were moving on and leaving me behind.
The time I could be happy was going and soon I'd be old and sour. I
didn't want to feel I'd done nothing and had never tasted life. Well,
my chance came and I pulled out."

"I'm afraid you haven't had your good time yet," Jim remarked.

Carrie's eyes sparkled. "One always wants something better, Jim, but
I've begun to live. I've seen the woods and the wild back country; I'm
helping at a big job."

"Your help is worth much, and if we put the job over, you can have the
things a girl is supposed to like; for example, pretty clothes, opera
tickets, a holiday at a fashionable summer hotel. They're things you
ought to have."

"I do like pretty clothes and think I'd like to meet smart people. The
trouble is,