a view of the city of Quebec. On a lay-figure in a corner was
thrown carelessly the sort of blanket coat worn by Canadians during winter
sports. Paints and palettes were arranged on a table by the wall, and on a
desk in the middle of the room were writing materials and books. More
books stood in a small suspended bookcase. Beside a comfortable
reading-chair one or two magazines lay on the floor. His gaze travelled
last to the large apron, or pinafore, on a peg fastened in a door
immediately beside his couch. The door suggested an inner room, and he got
up promptly to explore it. It proved to be cramped and dark, lighted only
from the larger apartment, which in its turn had but the one high north
window of the ordinary studio. The small room was little more than a shed
or "lean-to", serving the purposes of kitchen and storeroom combined. The
arrangements of the whole cabin showed that some one had built it with a
view to passing in seclusion a few days at a time without forsaking the
simpler amenities of civilized life; and it was clear that that "some one"
was a woman. What interested Ford chiefly for the moment was the discovery
of a sealed glass jar of water, from which he was able to slake his twenty
hours' thirst.

Returning to the room in which he had slept, he drew back the green silk
curtain covering the north light in order to take his bearings. As he had
guessed on the previous night, the slope on which the cabin was perched
broke steeply down into a wooded gorge, beyond which the lower hills
rolled in decreasing magnitude to the shore of Champlain, visible from
this point of view in glimpses, less as an inland sea than like a chain of
lakelets. Sunrise over Vermont flooded the waters with tints of rose and
saffron, but made of the Green Mountains a long, gigantic mass of
purple-black twisting its jagged outline toward the north into the Hog's
Back and the Camel's Hump with a kind of monstrous grace. To the east, in
New York, the Adirondacks, with the sunlight full upon them, shot up
jade-colored peaks into the electric blue--the scarred pyramid of Graytop
standing forth dark, detached, and alone, like a battered veteran
sentinel.

In an access of conscious hatred of this vast panoramic beauty which had
become the background of his tragedy, Ford pulled the curtain into place
again and turned once more to the interior of the room. It began to seem
more strange to him the more it grew familiar. Why was he here?