When Carmel returned to the office Evan Pell was not there, nor did she see him until the following day. That evening, after her supper, she walked. She could not remain in her room to read, nor go to the office to work. She was lonesome, discouraged, frightened. The events of the day had upset her until she seethed.... Motion was necessary. Only in rapid exercise could she find the anodyne necessary to quiet the jangling of her nerves. The evening was fine, lighted by a summer moon which touched the mountains with magic and transformed the forest into a glowing mystery of silver. She did not walk to think, but as the distance unrolled between her feet and the disturbed nerves became quiescent, she did think. For the first time she considered Evan Bartholomew Pell as a human being. Never before had he been human to her, but a crackling, parchment creature, not subject to joys and sorrows, not adaptable to friendships and social relations. She had pictured him carelessly as an entity to himself, unrelated to the world which moved about him, and loved and hated and coveted and covered itself with a mantle of charity. He had aroused her sympathy by his helplessness and his incapacity--a rather contemptuous sympathy.... Her contempt was gone, never to return. She speculated upon the possible workings of his mind; what was to become of him; why he was as he was. He became a human possibility in her mind, capable of _something_. She saw how there resided in him, in spite of his wasted years, in spite of the incubus of precocity which had ridden him from childhood, the spirit of which men are created.... She wondered if he were capable of breaking through the crust and of emerging such a man as the world might admire.... She doubted it. The crust was so thick and so hard. Of one thing she was certain--never again could she sneer at him or treat him with supercilious superiority, for, whatever his patent defects, she had been compelled to recognize that the foundations of him were admirable.... She vowed, in her impulsive way, to make amends. She went even farther, as is the way with girls both impulsive and calculating--she determined to remake Evan Pell, to remodel him along lines of her own designing.... Women love to renovate men; it is, perhaps, the major side line to the primary business of their lives--and God knows what that may be! Carmel paid scant attention to the road she followed. It was a pleasant road, a silvery-bright road. It contented her and seemed a road which must lead to some desirable destination. The destination was vague and distant; she did not hope to reach it, but it amused and stirred her to think there must be such a terminal.