trong enough to carry her through whatever
black days might come to her there alone.

She would gladly have cooked her supper in the kitchen fireplace, and
laid down to sleep under her own roof. It seemed the natural thing to
do. But she had not expected to find the cabin livably arranged, and
she had promised the Lauers to spend the night with them. So presently
she closed the door and walked away through the woods.

CHAPTER XXXIV

AFTER MANY DAYS

September and October trooped past, and as they marched the willow
thickets and poplar groves grew yellow and brown, and carpeted the
floor of the woods with fallen leaves. Shrub and tree bared gaunt
limbs to every autumn wind. Only the spruce and pine stood forth in
their year-round habiliments of green. The days shortened steadily.
The nights grew long, and bitter with frost. Snow fell, blanketing
softly the dead leaves. Old Winter cracked his whip masterfully over
all the North.

Day by day, between tasks, and often while she worked, Hazel's eyes
would linger on the edges of the clearing. Often at night she would
lift herself on elbow at some unexpected sound, her heart leaping wild
with expectation. And always she would lie down again, and sometimes
press her clenched hand to her lips to keep back the despairing cry.
Always she adjured herself to be patient, to wait doggedly as Bill
would have waited, to make due allowance for immensity of distance for
the manifold delays which might overtake a messenger faring across
those silent miles or a man hurrying to his home. Many things might
hold him back. But he would come. It was inconceivable that he might
not come.

Meantime, with only a dim consciousness of the fact, she underwent a
marvelous schooling in adaptation, self-restraint. She had work of a
sort, tasks such as every housewife finds self-imposed in her own home.
She was seldom lonely. She marveled at that. It was unique in her
experience. All her old dread of the profound silence, the pathless
forests which infolded like a prison wall, distances which seemed
impossible of span, had vanished. In its place had fallen over her an
abiding sense of peace, of security. The lusty storm winds whistling
about the cabin sang a restful lullaby. When the wolves lifted their
weird, melancholy plaint to the cold, star-jeweled skies, she listened
without the old shudder. These things, which were wont to oppress her,
to send her imagination reel