charm, it was only as a man learns
to love an alien mistress, whose alternating moods of savagery and
softness hold him with a spell of which he is half afraid. More than any
one suspected or he could have explained, his reckless life had been the
rebellion of his man-trained, urban instinct against the domination of
this supreme earth-force, to which he was of no more value than a falling
leaf or a dissolving cloud. Even now, as he flung himself on the forest's
protection, it was not with the solace of the son returning to the mother;
it was rather as a man might take refuge from a lion in a mammoth cavern,
where the darkness only conceals dangers.

After the struggle with crude nature the smooth, grass-carpeted
wagon-track brought him more than a physical sense of comfort. It not only
made his flight swift and easy, but it had been marked out by man, for
man's purposes and to meet man's need. It was the result of a human
intelligence; it led to a human goal. It was possible that it might lead
even him into touch with human sympathies With the thought, he became
conscious all at once that he was famished and fatigued. Up to the present
he had been as little aware of a body as a spirit on its way between two
worlds. It had ached and sweated and bled; but he had not noticed it. The
electric fluid could not have seemed more tireless or iron more insensate.
But now, when the hardship was somewhat relaxed, he was forced back on the
perception that he was faint and hungry His speed slackened; his shoulders
sagged; the long second wind, which had lasted so well, began to shorten.
For the first time it occurred to him to wonder how long his strength
would hold out.

It was then that he noticed a deflection of the wood-road toward the
north, and down over the brow of the plateau on which for a mile or two
its evenness had been sustained. It was a new sign that it was tending
toward some habitation. Half an hour ago he would have taken this to mean
that he must dash into the forest again; but half an hour ago he had not
been hungry. He did not say to himself that he would venture to any man's
door and ask for bread. So far as he knew, he would never venture to any
man's door again; nevertheless, he kept on, down-hill, and down-hill
nearer and nearer the lake, and farther and farther from the mountain and
the lairs of safety.

Suddenly, at a turning, when he was not expecting it, the wood-road
emerged into a rough clearing. On