calico gown, her straggling hair, and her felt hat, and a revulsion of feeling seized her.  She crept like a wounded animal out of the underwood, and then ran swiftly and almost fiercely back towards the cabin.  She ran so fast that for a time she almost kept pace with the doctor and Hoskins in the wagon on the distant trail.  Then she dived into the underwood again, and making a short cut through the forest, came at the end of two hours within hailing distance of the cabin,—­footsore and exhausted, in spite of the strange excitement that had driven her back.  Here she thought she heard voices—­his voice among the rest—­calling her, but the same singular revulsion of feeling hurried her vaguely on again, even while she experienced a foolish savage delight in not answering the summons.  In this erratic wandering she came upon the spring she had found on her first entrance in the forest a year ago, and drank feverishly a second time at its trickling source.  She could see that since her first visit it had worn a great hollow below the tree roots and now formed a shining, placid pool.  As she stooped to look at it, she suddenly observed that it reflected her whole figure as in a cruel mirror,—­her slouched hat and loosened hair, her coarse and shapeless gown, her hollow cheeks and dry yellow skin,—­in all their hopeless, uncompromising details.  She uttered a quick, angry, half-reproachful cry, and turned again to fly.  But she had not gone far before she came upon the hurrying figures and anxious faces of the doctor and Hoskins.  She stopped, trembling and irresolute.

“Ah,” said the doctor, in a tone of frank relief.  “Here you are!  I was getting worried about you.  Waya said you had been gone since morning!” He stopped and looked at her attentively.  “Is anything the matter?”

His evident concern sent a warm glow over her chilly frame, and yet the strange sensation remained.  “No—­no!” she stammered.

Doctor Ruysdael turned to Hoskins.  “Go back and tell Waya I’ve found her.”

Libby felt that the doctor only wanted to get rid of his companion, and became awed again.

“Has anybody been bothering you?”

“No.”

“Have the diggers frightened you?”

“No”—­with a gesture of contempt.

“Have you and Waya quarreled?”

“Nary”—­with a faint, tremulous smile.

He still stared at her, and then dropped his blue eyes musingly.  “Are you lonely here?  Would you rather go to San Jose?”

Like a flash the figures of the two smartly dressed women started up before her again, with every detail of their fresh and wholesome finery as cruelly distinct as had been her own shapeless ugliness in the mirror of the spring.  “No!  No!” she broke out vehemently and passionately.  “Never!”

He smiled gently.  “Look here!  I’ll send you up some books.  You read—­don’t you?” She nodded quickly.  “Some magazines and papers.  Odd I never thought of it before,” he added half musingly.  “Come along to the cabin.  And,” he stopped again and said decisively, “the next time you want anything, don’t wait for me to come, but write.”