The blood of a gentle mother had effectually subdued in her the
fierce impetuosity of her father--as in life the frail little wife had
dominated the boisterous husband. Tressa wanted most to be loved. It
was food to her self-respect, to her easy and appealing ways, even to
the laugh bubbling so readily to her rosy lips. Most of all she wanted
to be loved by Adrian Conrad; her father--well, his love was impervious
to influence.

In her gentle love of peace the bickerings that surrounded her made her
shrink within herself, wondering, staunch in her faith that her daddy
and Adrian were right--without these blundering, uneducated foreigners
being quite as bad as their masters thought.

Desiring to escape it all for a time, she crept away one late afternoon
when Adrian and her father were in conference with the two Policemen.
They did not seem to notice. Less than a week ahead was the
commencement of the last operation on the trestle before handing over
to the big contractors complete; and the anxiety of the moment spoke in
the firmness of their tone and the grimness of their measures. Tressa
stole away, troubled at heart.

In her favourite retreat, a cluster of slender birch trees deep in the
forest, she seated herself on a fallen trunk and unrolled her
crocheting. Through the thin foliage the sun filtered over her hair
and spangled the ground at her feet. A breeze as gentle as herself
whispered above her head in friendly commune with the great rustle of
the forest. Secluded without being closed in from the light, she felt
that she might untangle there more clearly the trifling problems of her
sheltered life.

As she worked she hummed. Into the network of woven threads she was
weaving the future--a month hence--a year--two years--five. And the
pictures pleased her progressively. Adrian, laughing into her eyes
after the season's hard struggle, was at her side . . . a happy husband
then . . . a beaming and foolishly proud father; and little tots with
their father's fair hair--

Something--more a feeling than a sound--arrested her. She flushed at
the thought that some one was looking at the pictures of her
imagination. Abashed, perhaps a trifle annoyed, but without a thought
of fear, she lifted her eyes. But when she beheld Koppy, hat in hand,
standing at the edge of her retreat with head bowed, his humility
seemed to call only for the sympathy always denied him. With maidenly
modesty she gathered her work