“You are determined to have my reason?” she asked in a tone that was entirely mechanical—­a tone that might have been her look made audible.

“If you please—­if I’m not asking too much.”

Apparently this lord of creation was yielding some part of his dominion over his co-creature.

“Very well, you shall know:  I am insane.”

The man started, then looked incredulous and was conscious that he ought to be amused.  But, again, the sense of humor failed him in his need and despite his disbelief he was profoundly disturbed by that which he did not believe.  Between our convictions and our feelings there is no good understanding.

“That is what the physicians would say,” the woman continued—­“if they knew.  I might myself prefer to call it a case of ‘possession.’  Sit down and hear what I have to say.”

The man silently resumed his seat beside her on the rustic bench by the wayside.  Over-against them on the eastern side of the valley the hills were already sunset-flushed and the stillness all about was of that peculiar quality that foretells the twilight.  Something of its mysterious and significant solemnity had imparted itself to the man’s mood.  In the spiritual, as in the material world, are signs and presages of night.  Rarely meeting her look, and whenever he did so conscious of the indefinable dread with which, despite their feline beauty, her eyes always affected him, Jenner Brading listened in silence to the story told by Irene Marlowe.  In deference to the reader’s possible prejudice against the artless method of an unpractised historian the author ventures to substitute his own version for hers.

II

A ROOM MAY BE TOO NARROW FOR THREE, THOUGH ONE IS OUTSIDE

In a little log house containing a single room sparely and rudely furnished, crouching on the floor against one of the walls, was a woman, clasping to her breast a child.  Outside, a dense unbroken forest extended for many miles in every direction.  This was at night and the room was black dark:  no human eye could have discerned the woman and the child.  Yet they were observed, narrowly, vigilantly, with never even a momentary slackening of attention; and that is the pivotal fact upon which this narrative turns.

Charles Marlowe was of the class, now extinct in this country, of woodmen pioneers—­men who found their most acceptable surroundings in sylvan solitudes that stretched along the eastern slope of the Mississippi Valley, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.  For more than a hundred years these men pushed ever westward, generation after generation, with rifle and ax, reclaiming from Nature and her savage children here and there an isolated acreage for the plow, no sooner reclaimed than surrendered to their less venturesome but more thrifty successors.  At last they burst through the edge of the forest into the open country