“I think we’ll have to stand it until spring...  If we want to go east, over the mountains—­this is no time.”

They had often speculated as to a route.  Most runaways took the road toward the coast and achieved capture even in the face of comparative indifference.  The trails to the east led into the heart of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  With the first breath of autumn these byways, difficult of achievement in any case, became more and more impassable.  And, while flight toward the west might be successful, it was too charged with a suggestion of failure to be tempting.

“We don’t just want to attempt to escape,” Starratt used to explain.  “We want to do it!”

“But, spring!” Monet would echo.  “That means May at the earliest.  The mountain passes will be impossible even in April.  Let’s try!”

“Come, come!  Why this sudden restlessness?  I thought your music would be a solace.  But it seems to have made you dissatisfied.  I can’t understand it.”

“We live by desire!  I am happy only when I am burning!  When the flame is out there are only ashes.”

Fred yielded finally to the extent of starting plans.  Food was the first consideration.  Monet was still in the dining room at Ward 6.  About the first of November he began hoarding sugar and rice.  A hollow tree in an obscure corner of the grounds back of the barns was the hiding place.  Everyday a little more was added to the store.  The process communicated a feeling of extraordinary interest to them both.  Around this almost trivial circumstance whirled the shadows of infinite romance.  Escape!  At last these two men had a goal ... they were no longer drifting.

Once a week Fred continued to receive two letters—­one from his wife and one from Ginger.  It was curious to compare them—­reading an ironical comedy between the lines ... creating the scenes that were being enacted by the triangle of women in front of the Hilmer dwelling every day in the early morning sunshine.  For, as time went on, it appeared that Ginger walked through her inscrutable part with irritating fidelity—­that is, irritating to Helen Starratt.  It could not be otherwise, Fred decided, remembering the look of cool contempt which his wife had thrown at Ginger’s departing figure on the day of their last interview.  He saw Mrs. Hilmer only vaguely, in a half-light, and yet out of the fragmentary sentences he got a sense of something patient and brooding and terrible waiting an appointed season.  She seemed to be sitting back like some veiled and mystic chorus, watching the duel of the other two and somehow shaping it to her passive purpose.

And where was Hilmer in it all?  Somehow, in spite of his masculine virility, he seemed to have no place nor footing upon the narrow ledge of feminine subtleties.  No doubt, as usual, he was proceeding in his direct and complacent line, unaware of anything save the brutally obvious...  Perhaps only the brutally obvious had any existence, perhaps Fred Starratt was spinning fantasies out of threads which came to his hand.  He did not know, he could not say, but in the still watches of the night the figures of these three women circled round and round the seething caldron of the future like skinny witches upon a blasted heath.