white streaks or the tremendous splitting,
crackling shock, or the thunderous boom and rumble along the
battlements of the Rim had no terrors. A storm eased her breast. Deep
in her heart was a hidden gathering storm. And somehow, to be out when
the elements were warring, when the earth trembled and the heavens
seemed to burst asunder, afforded her strange relief.

The summer days became weeks, and farther and farther they carried
Ellen on the wings of solitude and loneliness until she seemed to look
back years at the self she had hated. And always, when the dark memory
impinged upon peace, she fought and fought until she seemed to be
fighting hatred itself. Scorn of scorn and hate of hate! Yet even her
battles grew to be dreams. For when the inevitable retrospect brought
back Jean Isbel and his love and her cowardly falsehood she would
shudder a little and put an unconscious hand to her breast and utterly
fail in her fight and drift off down to vague and wistful dreams. The
clean and healing forest, with its whispering wind and imperious
solitude, had come between Ellen and the meaning of the squalid sheep
ranch, with its travesty of home, its tragic owner. And it was coming
between her two selves, the one that she had been forced to be and the
other that she did not know--the thinker, the dreamer, the romancer,
the one who lived in fancy the life she loved.

The summer morning dawned that brought Ellen strange tidings. They
must have been created in her sleep, and now were realized in the
glorious burst of golden sun, in the sweep of creamy clouds across the
blue, in the solemn music of the wind in the pines, in the wild screech
of the blue jays and the noble bugle of a stag. These heralded the day
as no ordinary day. Something was going to happen to her. She divined
it. She felt it. And she trembled. Nothing beautiful, hopeful,
wonderful could ever happen to Ellen Jorth. She had been born to
disaster, to suffer, to be forgotten, and die alone. Yet all nature
about her seemed a magnificent rebuke to her morbidness. The same
spirit that came out there with the thick, amber light was in her. She
lived, and something in her was stronger than mind.

Ellen went to the door of her cabin, where she flung out her arms,
driven to embrace this nameless purport of the morning. And a
well-known voice broke in upon her rapture.

"Wal, lass, I like to see you happy an' I hate myself fer comin'.
Because I've b