to end--for a few hours, at least--the ache in her heart and
the benumbing whirl of her thought.

But this respite was denied her. Almost at once she began to fancy that a
multitudinous minute creeping and stirring was going on about her--in her
hair, over her neck, across her feet. For a time she explained this by
reference to her disordered nerves, but at last some realization of the
truth came to her, and she sprang out upon the floor in horror and
disgust. Lighting the lamp, she turned to scrutinize her couch. It swarmed
with vermin. The ceiling was spattered with them. They raced across the
walls in platoons, thin and voracious as wolves.

With a choking, angry, despairing moan she snatched her clothing from the
chair and stood at bay. It needed but this touch to complete her
disillusionment.

II

THE FOREST RANGER

From her makeshift bed in the middle of the floor Lee Virginia was
awakened next morning by the passing of some one down the hall calling at
each door, "Six o'clock!" She had not slept at all till after one. She was
lame, heart-weary, and dismayed, but she rose and dressed herself as
neatly as before. She had decided to return to Sulphur. "I cannot endure
this," she had repeated to herself a hundred times. "I _will_ not!"

Hearing the clatter of dishes, she ventured (with desperate courage) into
the dining-room, which was again filled with cowboys, coal-miners,
ranchers and their tousled families, and certain nondescript town loafers
of tramp-like appearance. The flies were nearly as bad as ever--but not
quite, for under Mrs. Wetherford's dragooning the waiters had made a
nerveless assault upon them with newspaper bludgeons, and a few of them
had been driven out into the street.

Slipping into a seat at the end of the table which offered the cleanest
cloth, Lee Virginia glanced round upon her neighbors with shrinking eyes.
All were shovelling their food with knife-blades and guzzling their coffee
with bent heads; their faces scared her, and she dropped her eyes.

At her left, however, sat two men whose greetings were frank and manly,
and whose table-manners betrayed a higher form of life. One of them was a
tall man with a lean red face against which his blond mustache lay like a
chalk-mark. He wore a corduroy jacket, cut in Norfolk style, and in the
collar of his yellow shirt a green tie was loosely knotted. His hands were
long and freckled, but were manifestly trained to polite usages.