had been anything to keep her mind from
continual dwelling on the manifold disagreeableness she had to cope
with, she might have felt differently, but there was not. She ate,
slept, worked,--ate, slept, and worked again,--till every fibre of her
being cried out in protest against the deadening round. She was like a
flower striving to attain its destiny of bloom in soil overrun with rank
weeds. Loneliness and hard, mean work, day after day, in which all that
had ever seemed desirable in life had neither place nor consideration,
were twin evils of isolation and flesh-wearying labor, from which she
felt that she must get away, or go mad.

But she did not go. Benton left to make his delivery to the mill
company, the great boom of logs gliding slowly along in the wake of a
tug, the _Chickamin_ in attendance. Benton's crew accompanied the boom.
Fyfe's gang loaded their donkey and gear aboard the scow and went home.
The bay lay all deserted, the woods silent. For the first time in three
months she had all her hours free, only her own wants to satisfy. Katy
John spent most of her time in the smoky camp of her people. Stella
loafed. For two days she did nothing, gave herself up to a physical
torpor she had never known before. She did not want to read, to walk
about, or even lift her eyes to the bold mountains that loomed massive
across the lake. It was enough to lie curled among pillows under the
alder and stare drowsily at the blue September sky, half aware of the
drone of a breeze in the firs, the flutter of birds' wings, and the lap
of water on the beach.

Presently, however, the old restless energy revived. The spring came
back to her step and she shed that lethargy like a cast-off garment. And
in so doing her spirit rose in hot rebellion against being a prisoner to
deadening drudgery, against being shut away from all the teeming life
that throve and trafficked beyond the solitude in which she sat immured.
When Charlie came back, there was going to be a change. She repeated
that to herself with determination. Between whiles she rambled about in
the littered clearing, prowled along the beaches, and paddled now and
then far outside the bay in a flat-bottomed skiff, restless, full of
plans. So far as she saw, she would have to face some city alone, but
she viewed that prospect with a total absence of the helpless feeling
which harassed her so when she first took train for her brother's camp.
She had passed through what she ter