she
turned her mount north into that mountain highway a scant two hours
before, the choice had been made without actual thought for the route
which she was selecting. And yet, conscious or instinctive, the choice
had brought her the things for which both brain and spirit were ahunger
that morning: A silence so profound that the vague, crackling wood
noises which disturbed it from time to time were not noises at all, but
only a part of its very being; a solitude so breathlessly big and
sweeping that she must needs throw out both slim arms finally in a
childishly eager effort to embrace a tithe of it--and a chance to be
alone!

The night before, as soon as she had re-entered hurriedly the glowing
lodge asprawl upon the hill, the impulse had first come to her--a swift
and almost blind desire to turn and escape, if only for a little while,
from the roomful of chatter and laughter and bright-eyed badinage
loosed upon her immediately after the unmasking, by Dexter Allison's
perfectly cadenced announcement of his daughter's engagement. All in a
breath the huge room had become stiflingly oppressive; the gaiety
unbearable. And at the end of the first half-hour following her
truancy she might have yielded to the impulse, pleading the first
flimsy excuse which would have purchased an opportunity to reconstruct
that hysterically mad minute or two with him whom she had just left a
little before in the hedge-gap, had not Miriam Burrell, at the very
moment of decision, stung her into realization of what meaning such an
act might convey to other less generous minds.

That tall and lithe-bodied and abrupt-tongued friend of hers, colorless
cheeks even paler against the black background, of her Mongolian
costume, still had eyes for the change which had come over the younger
girl, in spite of the terror which had been congealing her own heart
since the moment of unmasking. Her vivid lips were still able to
smile, stiffly, when she finally drew Barbara into a corner and under
cover of her lacquered fan mockingly pinched a little color into her
wan cheeks. But that strange girl failed to realize how much of scorn
for a thing she labeled her own cowardice, she put into her words that
night.

"Please remember, dear child," she whispered, "that you are on
exhibition as the ingenuously happy bride-to-be. If you are going to
play the game this way, like the rest of them, why not be a good sport
and play it for all there is in it? One o