After a time she heard Benton come into their living room and light a fire in the heater.  She dried her eyes and went out to face him.

“Charlie,” she declared desperately, “I can’t stay here any longer.  It’s simply impossible.”

“Don’t start that song again.  We’ve had it often enough,” he answered stubbornly.  “You’re not going—­not till spring.  I’m not going to let you go in the frame of mind you’re in right now, anyhow.  You’ll get over that.  Hang it, I’m not the first man whose foot slipped.  It isn’t your funeral, anyway.  Forget it.”

The grumbling coarseness of this retort left her speechless.  Benton got the fire going and went out.  She saw him cross to the kitchen, and later she saw Katy John leave the camp with all her belongings in a bundle over her shoulder, trudging away to the camp of her people around the point.

Kipling’s pregnant line shot across her mind: 

“For the colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under their skins.”

“I wonder,” she mused.  “I wonder if we are?  I wonder if that poor, little, brown-skinned fool isn’t after all as much a victim as I am.  She doesn’t know better, maybe; but Charlie does, and he doesn’t seem to care.  It merely embarrasses him to be found out, that’s all.  It isn’t right.  It isn’t fair, or decent, or anything.  We’re just for him to—­to use.”

She looked out along the shores piled high with broken ice and snow, through a misty air to distant mountains that lifted themselves imperiously aloof, white spires against the sky,—­over a forest all draped in winter robes; shore, mountains, and forest alike were chill and hushed and desolate.  The lake spread its forty-odd miles in a boomerang curve from Roaring Springs to Fort Douglas, a cold, lifeless gray.  She sat a long time looking at that, and a dead weight seemed to settle upon her heart.  For the second time that day she broke down.  Not the shamed, indignant weeping of an hour earlier, but with the essence of all things forlorn and desolate in her choked sobs.

She did not hear Jack Fyfe come in.  She did not dream he was there, until she felt his hand gently on her shoulder and looked up.  And so deep was her despondency, so keen the unassuaged craving for some human sympathy, some measure of understanding, that she made no effort to remove his hand.  She was in too deep a spiritual quagmire to refuse any sort of aid, too deeply moved to indulge in analytical self-fathoming.  She had a dim sense of being oddly comforted by his presence, as if she, afloat on uncharted seas, saw suddenly near at hand a safe anchorage and welcoming hands.  Afterward she recalled that.  As it was, she looked up at Fyfe and hid her wet face in her hands again.  He stood silent a few seconds.  When he did speak there was a peculiar hesitation in his voice.

“What is it?” he said softly.  “What’s the trouble now?”

Briefly she told him, the barriers of her habitual reserve swept aside before the essentially human need to share a burden that has grown too great to bear alone.