As they walked back to the cabin she reflected that the letter had lain four days in the postoffice at Pagosa. It had been written nine days before. Then Ewing had done the thing. She no more believed that Randall Teevan still lived than she believed that the mountains about her were phantoms. A sentence from the letter ran in her mind. "We must take life as it falls--do the next thing without complaining, even if it is the hardest thing." "The hardest thing!" She pleaded fatigue and lack of appetite to Virginia and sought her bed to lie and think in the dark. She saw her own hardest thing, the thing she must do. She had caused a man to be put to death; a vicious, mischievous fool, it was true, but still a man. That was sad and horrible. But of another man, one she had thought to guard and cherish and care for in all of woman's ways--she had made a murderer, and she had murdered him. For she knew that Ewing must die. It was as if he were already dead. Perhaps out there in the agonized void of the world he had already killed himself, his work being done. Or, if not, they would kill him. She felt a blind, hollow sickness, as if her heart had broken and was bleeding away inside her. She had made her beloved a slayer and had slain him. She could not live with it. She hungered for her own death with intolerable desire. She arose with a despair-cleared mind the next morning, her resolve made. Only the smaller details were to be worked out. She walked by the lake, resolving these. Once she wept, from the very abundance and color of life about her. Life was so full, and she had taken it from him in his splendid youth. But she would not shirk the penalty of her blood-guiltiness. She looked out to the hills beyond the valley that fell away from the lake, studying headland and wooded slope and canyon opening, choked with green. Some spot far out there would be secret and gracious to her--welcome her with a finger on its lips--take her and keep. Death, to her, was no longer terrible. There had been a long intimacy with it. She rushed to the idea of it as to a home--a benignant succor from the unendurable thought. Back in the cabin she lay counting the minutes as they rushed--thinking and counting. She must not let herself be prisoned by a mere body that exulted blindly, basely, in its vigor. She could make everything right. She could conform to the law of a life for a life.