But when lunch was over, she was at the end of her resources.  Jack Junior settled in his crib for a nap.  Fyfe went away to that area back of the camp where arose the crash of falling trees and the labored puffing of donkey engines.  She could hear faint and far the voices of the falling gangs that cried:  “Tim-ber-r-r-r.”  She could see on the bank, a little beyond the bunkhouse and cook-shack, the big roader spooling up the cable that brought string after string of logs down to the lake.  Rain or sun, happiness or sorrow, the work went on.  She found it in her heart to envy the sturdy loggers.  They could forget their troubles in the strain of action.  Keyed as she was to that high pitch, that sense of their unremitting activity, the ravaging of the forest which produced the resources for which she had sold herself irritated her.  She was very bitter when she thought that.

She longed for some secluded place to sit and think, or try to stop thinking.  And without fully realizing the direction she took, she walked down past the camp, crossed the skid-road, stepping lightly over main line and haul-back at the donkey engineer’s warning, and went along the lake shore.

A path wound through the belt of brush and hardwood that fringed the lake.  Not until she had followed this up on the neck of a little promontory south of the bay, did she remember with a shock that she was approaching the place where Monohan had begged her to meet him.  She looked at her watch.  Two-thirty.  She sought the shore line for sight of a boat, wondering if he would come in spite of her refusal.  But to her great relief she saw no sign of him.  Probably he had thought better of it, had seen now as she had seen then that no good and an earnest chance of evil might come of such a clandestine meeting, had taken her stand as final.

She was glad, because she did not want to go back to the house.  She did not want to make the effort of wandering away in the other direction to find that restful peace of woods and water.  She moved up a little on the point until she found a mossy boulder and sat down on that, resting her chin in her palms, looking out over the placid surface of the lake with somber eyes.

And so Monohan surprised her.  The knoll lay thick-carpeted with moss.  He was within a few steps of her when a twig cracking underfoot apprised her of some one’s approach.  She rose, with an impulse to fly, to escape a meeting she had not desired.  And as she rose, the breath stopped in her throat.

Twenty feet behind Monohan came Jack Fyfe with his hunter’s stride, soundlessly over the moss, a rifle drooping in the crook of his arm.  A sunbeam striking obliquely between two firs showed her his face plainly, the faint curl of his upper lip.

Something in her look arrested Monohan.  He glanced around, twisted about, froze in his tracks, his back to her.  Fyfe came up.  Of the three he was the coolest, the most rigorously self-possessed.  He glanced from Monohan to his wife, back to Monohan.  After that his blue eyes never left the other man’s face.