at for a time she almost kept pace with the
doctor and Hoskins in the wagon on the distant trail. Then she dived
into the underwood again, and making a short cut through the
forest, came at the end of two hours within hailing distance of the
cabin,--footsore and exhausted, in spite of the strange excitement that
had driven her back. Here she thought she heard voices--his voice
among the rest--calling her, but the same singular revulsion of feeling
hurried her vaguely on again, even while she experienced a foolish
savage delight in not answering the summons. In this erratic wandering
she came upon the spring she had found on her first entrance in the
forest a year ago, and drank feverishly a second time at its trickling
source. She could see that since her first visit it had worn a great
hollow below the tree roots and now formed a shining, placid pool. As
she stooped to look at it, she suddenly observed that it reflected her
whole figure as in a cruel mirror,--her slouched hat and loosened
hair, her coarse and shapeless gown, her hollow cheeks and dry yellow
skin,--in all their hopeless, uncompromising details. She uttered a
quick, angry, half-reproachful cry, and turned again to fly. But she had
not gone far before she came upon the hurrying figures and anxious faces
of the doctor and Hoskins. She stopped, trembling and irresolute.

"Ah," said the doctor, in a tone of frank relief. "Here you are! I was
getting worried about you. Waya said you had been gone since morning!"
He stopped and looked at her attentively. "Is anything the matter?"

His evident concern sent a warm glow over her chilly frame, and yet the
strange sensation remained. "No--no!" she stammered.

Doctor Ruysdael turned to Hoskins. "Go back and tell Waya I've found
her."

Libby felt that the doctor only wanted to get rid of his companion, and
became awed again.

"Has anybody been bothering you?"

"No."

"Have the diggers frightened you?"

"No"--with a gesture of contempt.

"Have you and Waya quarreled?"

"Nary"--with a faint, tremulous smile.

He still stared at her, and then dropped his blue eyes musingly. "Are
you lonely here? Would you rather go to San Jose?"

Like a flash the figures of the two smartly dressed women started up
before her again, with every detail of their fresh and wholesome finery
as cruelly distinct as had been her own shapeless ugliness in the mirror
of the spring. "No! NO!" she broke out vehemently and passionately