By a miracle of self-command, she managed to keep control of her voice.  “Yes,” she said.  “That—­that other’s all over, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,” he demurred around a comfortable yawn.  “I expect it will catch us again every now and then.  But, in the main, we’re sane people, ready to go on with our own business.  What was it you were reading?”

“I don’t believe I’ll read any more just now,” she said.  “I think I’ll go out for a walk.”  And she managed to get outside the room without his discovering that anything was wrong.

It was, indeed, her first preoccupation, to make sure he shouldn’t discover the effect his words had had on her—­to get far enough away before the storm broke so that she could have it out by herself.  The crowning humiliation would be if he came blundering in on her and asked her what was the matter.

She fled down the trail to the little lake, ran out a canoe, caught up a paddle and bent a feverish energy to the task of getting safely around into the shelter of a fir-grown point before she let herself stop, as she would have said, to think.  It wasn’t really to think, of course.  Not, that is, to interpret out to the end of all its logical implications, the admission he had so unconsciously made to her that morning.

She had never seriously been hurt or frightened, Portia had said weeks ago.  And when she said it, it was true.  She was both hurt and frightened now, and the instinct that had urged her to fly was as simple and primitive as that which urges a wounded animal to hide.

Indeed, if you could have seen her after she had swung her paddle inboard, sitting there, gripping the gunwales with both hands, panting, her wide eyes dry, you might easily have thought of some defenseless wild thing cowering in a momentary shelter, listening for the baying of pursuing hounds.

He didn’t love her any more, that was what he had said.  For what was the thing he had so cheerfully described himself as cured of, what were the symptoms he had enumerated as if he had been talking about a disease—­the obsession with her, the inability to get her further away than the middle ground of his thoughts, and then only temporarily; the necessity of saying everything he said and doing everything he did, with reference to her; the fact that his mind could focus itself sharply on nothing in the world but just herself?—­What was all that but the veritable description, though in hostile terms, of the love he had promised to feel for her till death should—­part them; of the very love she felt for him, this moment stronger than ever?

Recurrent waves of the panic broke over her, during which she would catch up her paddle again and drive ahead, blindly, without any conscious knowledge of where she was going.  And in the intervals, she drifted.

The relief of tears didn’t come to her until she saw, just ahead, the island where, for two paradisiacal weeks, she and Rodney had made their camp.  Here she beached her canoe and went ashore; crept into a little natural shelter under a jutting rock, where they had lain one day while, for three hours, a violent unheralded storm had whipped the lake to lather.  The heap of hemlock branches he had cut for a couch for them was still there.