path, finally stopped, she sat
down with a great swelling breath. "Well, I guess this is the end," she
said aloud, instantly thereafter making a pretense to herself that she
meant the road. She looked about her with a brave show of interest in the
bare November woods, unroofed and open to the sunlight, and was rewarded
by a throb of real interest to observe that she was where she had not been
for forty years, when she used to clamber over the spur of Hemlock
Mountain to hunt for lady's-slippers in the marshy ground at the head of
the gorge. A few steps more and she would be on her own property, a steep,
rocky tract of brushland left her by her great-uncle. She had a throb as
she realized that, besides her house and garden, this unsalable bit of the
mountainside was her only remaining possession. She had indeed come to the
end.

With the thought came her old dogged defiance to despair. She shut her
hands on her crutches, pulled herself heavily up to her feet, and toiled
forward through some brush. She would not allow herself to think if
thoughts were like that. Soon she came out into a little clearing beside
the Winthrop Branch, swirling and fumbling in its headlong descent. The
remains of a stone wall and a blackened beam or two showed her that she
had hit upon the ruins of the old sawmill her great-grandfather had owned.
This forgotten and abandoned decay, a symbol of the future of the whole
region, struck a last blow at the remnants of her courage. She sank down
on the wall and set herself to a losing struggle with the blackness that
was closing in about her. All her effort had been in vain. The fight was
over. She had not a weapon left.

A last spark of valor flickered into flame within her. She stood up,
lifting her head high, and summoning with a loudly beating heart every
scattered energy. She was alive; her fight could not be over while she
still breathed.

For an instant she stood, self-hypnotized by the intensity of her
resolution. Then there burst upon her ear, as though she had not heard it
before, the roar of the water rushing past her. It sounded like a loud
voice calling to her. She shivered and turned a little giddy as though
passing into a trance, and then, with one bound, the gigantic forces of
subconscious self, wrought by her long struggle to a white heat of
concentration on one aim, arose and mastered her. For a time--hours
perhaps--she never knew how long, old Miss Abigail was a genius, with the