She got up, brushed the leaves from her skirt, and went to her horse.  They rode home through the columned aisles of the forest almost silently.  The rough, straight trunks of the redwoods rose all about them, catching gold and red on their thick, fibrous bark from the setting sun.  The horses’ feet made no sound on the corduroy roadway.

For several days nothing more was said of Paul’s going or staying.  Miss Chisholm went her usual busy round.  Paul wrote his letter of resignation and carried it to the dinner-table one night, hoping to read it later to her, and win her approval of its finely rounded sentences.

But a heavy mail came down the trail that evening, brought by the obliging doctor from Emville, who had been summoned to dress the wounds of one of the line-men who had got too close to the murderous “sixty thousand” and had been badly burned by “the juice.”  And after the letters were read, and the good doctor had made his patient comfortable, he proved an excellent fourth hand at the game of bridge for which they were always hungering.

So at one o’clock Paul went upstairs with his letter still unapproved.  He hesitated in the dim upper hallway, wondering if Patricia, who had left the men to beer and crackers half an hour earlier, had retired, or was, by happy chance, still gossiping with Mrs. Tolley or Min.  While he loitered in the hall, the door of her room swung slowly open.

Paul had often been in this room, which was merely a kind of adjunct to the sleeping-porch beyond.  He went to the doorway and said, “Patricia!”

The room, wide and charmingly furnished, was quite empty.  On the deep couch letters were scattered in a wide circle, and in their midst was an indentation as if some one had been kneeling on the floor with her elbows there.  Paul noticed this with a curious feeling of unease, and then called softly again, “Patricia!”

No answer.  He walked hesitatingly to his own room and to the window.  Why he should have looked down at the dark path with the expectation of seeing her, he did not know; but it was almost without surprise that he recognized the familiar white ruffles and dark head moving away in the gloom.  Paul unhesitatingly followed.

He followed her down the trail as far as he had seen her go, and was standing, a little undecidedly, wondering just which way she had turned, when his heart was suddenly brought into his throat by the sound of her bitter sobbing.

A moment later he saw her.  She was sitting on a smooth fallen trunk, and had buried her face in her hands.  Paul had never heard such sobs; they seemed to shake her from head to foot.  Hardly would they lessen, bringing him the hope that her grief, whatever it was, was wearing itself out, when a fresh paroxysm would shake her, and she would abandon herself to it.  This lasted for what seemed a long, long time.

After a while Paul cleared his throat, but she did not hear him.  And again he stood motionless, waiting and waiting.  Finally, when she straightened up and began to mop her eyes, he said, trembling a little: