As he strode away toward a grove of firs he was lost to her eyes before he had gone a hundred paces. The night came so swiftly it seemed to her feverish fancies that in the dark the big tree trunks were huddling closer together. In a moment she heard the sound of his axe, striking softly through green juicy branches. He worked swiftly, grudging every minute away from her. And then, with his arms full of the fragrant, balsamy boughs, he stopped and let them slip down to the ground and himself sat down upon a log and filled his pipe with slow fingers. He'd force himself to smoke one pipe before he went back to her, thinking that she would be grateful for a few moments alone.
Almost with the first puff of smoke there came to him Gloria's piercing scream. His heart stopping, he jumped up and ran through the trees to her, shouting: "Gloria I Gloria! I'm coming. What is it?"
Gloria was cowering against the nearest tree, her face showing frightened in the firelight, her eyes wide with nervous horror.
"There is something there ... in the bushes!" she cried excitedly. "I heard it moving...."
He looked where she pointed. Down by the creek, just waddling back into the alders, was a fat old porcupine, dimly seen in the fringe of the camp-fire. But King did not laugh. His first impulse upon him, strengthened by Gloria's helplessness, he took her into his arms, holding her close to him.
"Why did you leave me?" asked Gloria petulantly. "So long."
He had been away from her fifteen minutes while he cut an armful of fir-boughs, and thereafter filled and lighted his pipe--and to Gloria the time had seemed long! Little enough of love's confession, surely, but a golden crumb to a man's starving love. He drew her closer; their faces, ruddy with fire-glow, each tense with its own emotion, were close together.
"Oh!" cried Gloria. She wrenched away from him violently. "You--you hurt me. Let me go!" She buried her face in her hands; he saw her shoulders lift and droop; he heard her sob: "Oh, I was a fool----"
His arms had dropped to his sides and he stood for a moment speechless, staring at her as across a chasm shadow-filled.
"Gloria," he said, bewildered.
But now her hands, too, were at her sides, clenched and nervous; her white face was lifted and she broke out passionately into hot words; he saw her breast heaving and sensed that she was stirred to depths never until now plumbed. What he could not glimpse were the vague, unreasonable reasons, the distorted horrors grinning at her among the spaces of black gloom into which her spirit had sunk; had he been a fancy-sick poet, a pale-blooded creature given to blue devils and nightmare conjecture, he might have come somewhere near an understanding. But being plain Mark King, a straightforward, healthy, and unjaundiced man, his comprehension found never a clue to a condition which in Gloria was hardly other than an inevitable result of all that had gone before.