t, beat her, and
make her a thing to loathe, and cut her mortally in his savage and
implacable thirst for revenge--but with her last gasp she would whisper
she loved him and that she had lied to him to kill his faith. It was
that--his strange faith in her purity--which had won her love. Of all
men, that he should be the one to recognize the truth of her, the
womanhood yet unsullied--how strange, how terrible, how overpowering!
False, indeed, was she to the Jorths! False as her mother had been to
an Isbel! This agony and destruction of her soul was the bitter Dead
Sea fruit--the sins of her parents visited upon her.

"I'll end it all," she whispered to the night shadows that hovered over
her. No coward was she--no fear of pain or mangled flesh or death or
the mysterious hereafter could ever stay her. It would be easy, it
would be a last thrill, a transport of self-abasement and supreme
self-proof of her love for Jean Isbel to kiss the Rim rock where his
feet had trod and then fling herself down into the depths. She was the
last Jorth. So the wronged Isbels would be avenged.

"But he would never know--never know--I lied to him!" she wailed to the
night wind.

She was lost--lost on earth and to hope of heaven. She had right
neither to live nor to die. She was nothing but a little weed along
the trail of life, trampled upon, buried in the mud. She was nothing
but a single rotten thread in a tangled web of love and hate and
revenge. And she had broken.

Lower and lower she seemed to sink. Was there no end to this gulf of
despair? If Colter had returned he would have found her a rag and a
toy--a creature degraded, fit for his vile embrace. To be thrust
deeper into the mire--to be punished fittingly for her betrayal of a
man's noble love and her own womanhood--to be made an end of, body,
mind, and soul.

But Colter did not return.

The wind mourned, the owls hooted, the leaves rustled, the insects
whispered their melancholy night song, the camp-fire flickered and
faded. Then the wild forestland seemed to close imponderably over
Ellen. All that she wailed in her despair, all that she confessed in
her abasement, was true, and hard as life could be--but she belonged to
nature. If nature had not failed her, had God failed her? It was
there--the lonely land of tree and fern and flower and brook, full of
wild birds and beasts, where the mossy rocks could speak and the
solitude had ears, where she had always f