s. Indian summer hung its mellow haze
over the land. The clean, pungent air that sifted through the forests
seemed doubly sweet after the vitiated atmosphere of town. Fresh from
a gridiron of dusty streets and stone pavements, and but stepped, as
one might say, from days of imprisonment in the narrow confines of a
railway coach, she drank the winey air in hungry gulps, and joyed in
the soft yielding of the turf beneath her feet, the fern and pea-vine
carpet of the forest floor.

It was her pleasure at night to sleep as she and Bill had slept, with
her face bared to the stars. She would draw her bed a little aside
from the camp fire and from the low seclusion of a thicket lie watching
the nimble flames at their merry dance, smiling lazily at the grotesque
shadows cast by Jake and his frau as they moved about the blaze. And
she would wake in the morning clear-headed, alert, grateful for the
pleasant woodland smells arising wholesomely from the fecund bosom of
the earth.

Lauer pulled up before his own cabin at mid-afternoon of the fourth
day, unloaded his own stuff, and drove to his neighbor's with the rest.

"I'll walk back after a little," Hazel told him, when he had piled her
goods in one corner of the kitchen.

The rattle of the wagon died away. She was alone--at home. Her eyes
filled as she roved restlessly from kitchen to living-room and on into
the bedroom at the end. Bill had unpacked. The rugs were down, the
books stowed in familiar disarray upon their shelves, the bedding
spread in semi-disorder where he had last slept and gone away without
troubling to smooth it out in housewifely fashion.

She came back to the living-room and seated herself in the big chair.
She had expected to be lonely, very lonely. But she was not. Perhaps
that would come later. For the present it seemed as if she had reached
the end of something, as if she were very tired, and had gratefully
come to a welcome resting place. She turned her gaze out the open door
where the forest fell away in vast undulations to a range of
snow-capped mountains purple in the autumn haze, and a verse that Bill
had once quoted came back to her:

"Oh, to feel the Wind grow strong
Where the Trail leaps down.
I could never learn the way
And wisdom of the Town."

She blinked. The town--it seemed to have grown remote, a fantasy in
which she had played a puppet part. But she was home again. If only
the gladness of it endured s