She coolly scanned the descending bed of a creek that the trail now crossed. The ravine widened below, and she saw that an ascent would be practicable farther down. It was time, then, to leave the trail. If the impossible should happen, if by some chance or trick of woodcraft they tracked her all the miles of her night-long ride, they must lose her here. She turned Cooney down the shallow stream with a furtive smile of pride in her own craft. He splashed through the water, stumbling over the submerged bowlders, but always recovering himself, and picking a sure way over the creek bed. The cool gray of the mist-steaming water reminded her that she was thirsty, but she would stop for nothing now. She knew herself for a coward at last, guilty of a cowardice hideously selfish. She had planned her act to be remote, secret, undiscoverable. But now she faced squarely the grief her loss would be to others. But the sting would pass. And she had her own right--her own obligation to meet. She had killed--she had killed her love--and she could not live. There was service she might have performed through the years, but others would perform it now, quite as acceptably. A gnat dropping from the ephemeral human swarm could be nothing but a gnat the less. She no longer pretended to call it the hardest thing. "But it's the next hardest," she pleaded to herself. Her lips quivered, but she stilled the spasm with a gust of fierce resolving to be done with the thing quickly. The shelving bank along which the stream had wound now fell away, and she could dimly make out a draw between two hills where she might ascend. She chose a place of broken stone and loose gravel for Cooney to clamber out, so that he might leave no sign even to a searcher who had come this far. Then, ascending the draw a little distance, she turned and sent him up the side of the lesser hill. The mist still shut her in, but she could make out that the woods were denser on this hill. Cooney made his way through a growth of the thick, wet buck brush, then between white files of the quaking aspen, and at last into the heavier wooded forest where his feet slipped and slid on the yielding pine needles as he climbed. The hill lengthened before her in gradual ascents, broken by terraces, and the way was rough with bowlders and fallen trees and the clutching tangle of undergrowth. But the mist, receding before her, revealed aisles of the wood farther on that allured her. She would be thorough. Ahead of her were ruddy, yellow hints of the sun, striking down through the green arches of the forest.