Then her lazy, complacent feelings departed, and were succeeded by a sudden, wide-awake surge of self-pity. She felt like Cinderella. Nobody had asked her to go anywhere or do anything, and nobody had even thought of doing so. When she was dead they would gather round her coffin and remember that they hadn't asked her to go anywhere or do anything, and they would be very sorry and ashamed and they would say what a nice girl she had been, and how she had always tried to give everybody a good time.

Between laughter and tears and mortification, Eve finished dressing, set her lovely jaw, and went out into the delicious, cool calm of the mountain morning. She could still hear the voices of many of the departing ones; and the rattling and creaking of the knockabout's blocks and rigging. She heard Herring say to Phyllis: "I think it would be better if I could make the boom go out on this side, but I can't." Phyllis's answer was a cool, contented laugh. It was as if she said: "Hang the boom! We're here!"

Have you ever had the feeling that you would like to board a swift boat, head for the open sea, and never come back? Or that you could plunge into some boundless, trackless forest and keep straight on until you were lost, and died (beautifully and painlessly), and were covered with beautiful leaves by little birds?

Eve enjoyed (and suffered from) a hint of this latter feeling. She ate a light breakfast (it would be better not to begin starving till she was actually lost in the boundless, trackless forest), selected a light, spiked climbing-stick with a crooked handle, headed for one of the northeasterly mountains, and was soon deep in the shade of the pines and hemlocks.

After a few miles, the trail that she followed split and scattered in many directions, like the end of an unravelled rope. She followed an old lumber road for a long way, turned into another that crossed it at an angle of forty-five degrees, took no account of the sun's position in the heavens or of the marked sides of trees. If she came to a high place from which there was a view, she did not look at it. She just kept going—this way and that, up and down. In short, she made a conscious, anxious effort to lose herself. The easterly mountain toward which she had first headed kept bobbing up straight ahead. And always there was the knowledge in the back of her head of the exact location of The Camp, and of all the other landmarks, familiar to her since early youth.

"Drag it!" she said, at length, her eyes on the mountain. "I'll climb the old thing, put melancholy aside, and call this a good, if unaccompanied, Sunday."

The morning coolness had departed. It was one of those hot, breathless, mountain forenoons that kill the appetite and are usually followed, toward the late afternoon, by violent electrical disturbances.