The Hidden Places

ble discovery. He could neither believe what he had seen nor deny the evidence of his vision. He kept watch, with the glasses re

watch on the house below until he came abreast of his own quarters and

lf out of periods of concentration in which there seemed, curiously, to be two of him present,-one questionin

ould not conceive a necessity for her doing this. He had so arranged his affairs when he went to France that she had access to and complete control of his fortune. When she disclosed to him by letter the curious transformation of her affections, he had not revoked that arrangement. In the bewildering shock of that disclosure his first thought ha

so-th

. From surety of what he had seen he passed to doubt, to uneasiness about himself: for if he could not look at

hile the embers of his noonday fire still glowed red on the h

for himself as a traveler in need of matches, some trifling thing to be borrowed. The wilderness is a destroyer of conventions. The passer-by needs to observe

ocial isolation which his disfigurement had inflicted upon him, Hollister had become as much guided by instinct in his actions and impulses

He peered through the drooping boughs of a clump of young cedar. There, in perfect concealment, hidden as the deer hides to let a rovi

been deserted. The house was one with the pervading hush of the valley. Hollister grew numb.

ircle, so that she faced Hollister squarely. He had the binoculars focused on her face. It seemed near enough to touch. Then she took

flat, gained the foot of the steep hill and climbed step by step

is astounding fact as a man must accept the indubitable. She was here in the flesh,-this fair-haired, delicate-skinned woman whose arms and lips had once been his sure refuge. Here, in a rude cabin on the brink of a froz

ublesome insistence. He had loved her. She had loved him. If that love had gone glimmering there still remained memory from which he could not escape, memories of caresses and embraces, of mutual passion, of all they had been to each other through

e. No normal man can. He may think he can. He may rest secure for a time in

ot prevent his mind from dwelling upon this woman who had once meant so much to him, nor his flesh from responding to the stimulus of her nearness. When a man i

f, suffering of body and anguish of mind had suppressed in him every fluttering of desire. He had accepted that apparent snuffing out of passion thankfully. Where, he had said to himself when he thought of this, where would he find such a woman as he could love who wou

ould not look out over the brow of that cliff without thinking of the woman in the valley below. He could not think of her without the floodgates of his recollection loosing their torrents. He had slept with her

uld grow blurred and meaningless. In the glow of the coals Myra's face would take form and mock him with a seductive smile. Out of the gallery of his mind pictures would come trooping, and in each the chief figure was that fair-h

rse less hotly. By no exercise of any power he possessed could he force his mind always to do his bidding. He did not love this woman whose nearness so profoundly disturbed him. Sometimes he hated her consciously, with a volcanic intensity that made his fingers itch for a strangling grip upon he

r which he could not bar out of his mind, those revived memories of alluring

and repulsed, a victim to his imagination and the fever of his flesh, until it seemed to him sometimes that in the

recurring again and again with insistent persuasion, until it no longer frightened

Legally, beyond any shadow of a doubt. The law and the Church had joined them together. Neither man nor God had put

ithin his rights. He postulated a hypothetical situation; if he, officially dead, resurrected himself and claimed her, who was there to say him nay if he demanded and exacted a liter

tily when slowly acquired moralities shrivel in the crucible of passion, now began to actuate Hollister with a strange cunning, a feroci

and the absence of the man. Falling snow to cover the single track that should lead to this cabin, to bury the dual footprints that should lead away. The absence of the man was to avoid a clash: not because Hollister feared that; simply because in his mind the man was n

hat nearly every day he was abroad in the woods with a gun. For the

,-with neither perception nor consideration of consequences. The consummation alone urge

that happy conjunction of circumstances which favored action. He must create his own circumsta

e woods the wind had swept the bald surface of this little ridge clear of snow. He could go down over those sloping rocks to the glare ice of the river. He c

me at last to the log cabin-what would he find? Only another man who had

laughter. It pleased him, this devastating jest which

il he saw the man leave the place, gun in hand, cross on the river ice and vanish in the heavy timber of that wide bottom land. Hollister did not know what business

down to the frozen river. Twenty minutes' rapi

le strength. The air that morning had softened to a balminess like spring. Hollister had approached unseen over snow softened by this warmth until it lost its fros

also at the table with one corner of it between them. She leaned an elbow on the board and nursed her round chin in the palm of that hand, while t

c heave. Otherwise she was motionless and faintly smiling, as if she were given up to some blissful languor. And th

. He could see their lips move. He could hear faintly the tense murmur of the ma

his face and wiped away drops of sweat, a clammy exudation that broke out all over his body very much as if he had just become aware of escaping by a hair's breadth some imminent and terrible

s looming high above the green-forested lowlands he was no longer sure of anything, least of all whether in him might lurk a duality of forces which could s

ow. The brake of his real manhood had begun to set upon those wild impulses before he drew up to the door

tural tendency to regard his own ethics as the common attribute of others. There had somehow been born in him, or had developed as an intrinsic part of his charac

man she lived with in that house on the river bank. Hollister had watched him through the glasses often enough to know. He was a tall, ruddy-faced man, a big man and handsome. Hollister had looked at him often enough, reckoning him to be an Englishman, the man Myra married in London, the ma

if she were the helpless victim of her own senses. There were women like that. Plenty of them. Men too. Suffere

edar grove that hid the log cabin. Here, amid this wild beauty, this grandeur of mountain and forest, this silent

y clearly that he had escaped an action that might have had far-reaching consequences. He was concerned with his escape and also with the possible recurrence of that strange obsession,

duskily green and full of balsamy odors from the forest, was still a goodly place to be. But old sins and sorrows and new, disturbi

osed. But he solved the problem by knowledge gained in those casual wanderings alon

into the dancing blaze, seeing strange visions in the glowing

ver through a wide flat. Here he moved through a forest of cedar and spruce so high and dense that no ray of sun ever penetrated through those interlocked branches to warm the earth in which those enormous trunks were rooted. Moss hung in streamers from the lower boughs. It was dusky there in full day. The wild

where loggers had been recently at work. Here a donkey engine stood black and cold on its skids, half-buried in snow. Beyond this working a clear field opened, and past the field he saw the outline of th