ely, yet she did not see. The
wilderness enveloped her with its secretive, elemental sheaths of rock,
of tree, of cloud, of sunlight. Through her thrilling skin poured the
multiple and nameless sensations of the living organism stirred to
supreme sensitiveness. She could not lie still, but all her movements
were gentle, involuntary. The slow reaching out of her hand, to grasp
at nothing visible, was similar to the lazy stretching of her limbs, to
the heave of her breast, to the ripple of muscle.

Ellen knew not what she felt. To live that sublime hour was beyond
thought. Such happiness was like the first dawn of the world to the
sight of man. It had to do with bygone ages. Her heart, her blood,
her flesh, her very bones were filled with instincts and emotions
common to the race before intellect developed, when the savage lived
only with his sensorial perceptions. Of all happiness, joy, bliss,
rapture to which man was heir, that of intense and exquisite
preoccupation of the senses, unhindered and unburdened by thought, was
the greatest. Ellen felt that which life meant with its inscrutable
design. Love was only the realization of her mission on the earth.

The dark storm cloud with its white, ragged ropes of lightning and
down-streaming gray veils of rain, the purple gulf rolling like a
colored sea to the dim mountains, the glorious golden light of the
sun--these had enchanted her eyes with her beauty of the universe. They
had burst the windows of her blindness. When she crawled into the
green-brown covert it was to escape too great perception. She needed
to be encompassed by close, tangible things. And there her body paid
the tribute to the realization of life. Shock, convulsion, pain,
relaxation, and then unutterable and insupportable sensing of her
environment and the heart! In one way she was a wild animal alone in
the woods, forced into the mating that meant reproduction of its kind.
In another she was an infinitely higher being shot through and through
with the most resistless and mysterious transport that life could give
to flesh.

And when that spell slackened its hold there wedged into her mind a
consciousness of the man she loved--Jean Isbel. Then emotion and
thought strove for mastery over her. It was not herself or love that
she loved, but a living man. Suddenly he existed so clearly for her
that she could see him, hear him, almost feel him. Her whole soul, her
very life cried out to him