lously. These
things came to her in just that order. And directly she was on the
road, trembling just a little and feeling very helpless, and
Claybrook's voice somewhere over in the darkness was giving
directions, sharp, irritated. To her knowledge he had not uttered a
word during it all. She could hear them somewhere over there crashing
about in the underbrush, an occasional word, an occasional suppressed
shout. Very unreal it was, with the stars shining faintly overhead,
the black shadows all around, and those two shafts of light poking out
into nowhere. She walked back to the inside edge of the road and sat
down, and bye-and-bye she felt quieter. It had been such a childishly
foolish thing to do and so useless. The minutes passed and she began
to wonder what time it was getting to be. And then she felt a growing
irritation and suddenly she was hungry. All she could hear was the
threshing about of the brush and the sound of heavy dragging. Once she
went around the rear of the car and peered down. She could dimly see
that the rear wheel had passed completely over the brink, and below it
lay a pile of sticks and brush. A little more and they might have
rolled over, down into the darkness. She returned to her seat by the
side of the road.

Just like a little boy he was, she thought--reckless, irresponsible,
"full of the fullness of living." And his tone, when she had spoken of
the dead-level of life in the city below them and the problem of
raising one's head--"That's what I mean to do"--had seemed so like the
confident tones of a child on the threshold of life. Were we all like
that, after all--lifted up for a moment so that we could see;
blundering forward the next, blindly, into pitfalls of our own making?
His very offer of help, there on the hilltop, had been naive, and yet
she was troubled by it. Why was he thrusting his stick into the still
waters of her life? And yet she had felt very much alone and in need
of the realization of another presence.

And then suddenly she realized why and how it was she liked him. She
liked to think of him as standing by, liked the realization of his
strength, his confidence. He was big, he was good-looking, and there
was a tonic freshness about him. He was good as a friend. And he
needed watching over, needed guiding, himself. That made it all the
better. And then she felt hungry again. But she was no longer
irritated.

The roar of the motor roused her from her musings. There wa