With no intention, but an involuntary desire to be where Amelia would not find him (and also, it was possible, where that other quietest of women could be found) he went down the road to the maples, and then plunged into the woods and up the hill. He had first gone along the road to mislead Amelia, if she chanced to be looking out. He couldn't have her following, and she was equal to it, pumps and all. Halfway up the hill, making his way through undergrowth where the snow packed heavily, he turned off at his left and so got into the wood road. And then, his breath coming quick from haste and the vexation of the clogged way, he did not slacken to cool off in the relief of easier going, but, breathless as he was, began to run, and got more breathless still. Tira was up there in the hut. He was sure of it. And for those first hurried minutes he forgot her presence there meant only added misery, but dwelt upon his own need of such a spirit as hers; the strength, the poise, the ready coolness. At the door he felt rebuffed, it looked so inhospitable, so tight against him. He tapped and waited. No one came. Then he tried it and found it locked and the revulsion was bitter. He was about turning away when it came to him that at least he might go in. The key would be under the stone. He put his hand into the hollow and found it there, and only when he was setting it in the lock realized that this meant a deeper loneliness. It would be easier to think she was there, the key turned against him, but still in his house, than to find the house itself void of her presence. He shook himself, in anger at the incomprehensible way the whole thing was moving him. Why should it move him? Then, finding it cold, the deserted room, he made himself busy and laid the fire and set the two chairs hospitably by the hearth. He did not light the fire. It must be ready for her if she came. After it was in order (her house, it seemed to him now, with a fatalism of belief he accepted and did not dwell upon) he sat down by the cold hearth and tried to think. But never of himself. He thought of her: beautiful, lustrous, caged bird with the door of her prison open, and who yet would not go. His mind went back to Milly, waiting there at home to apply scientific remedies to his diseased spirit, and he laughed a little, Milly seemed of such small consequence. But the thought of the misery of mind that had brought him here gave him a new sense of the cruelty of the world. For it had been the sad state of the whole world he had fled away from and here, as if all misery had converged to a point, he had taken a straight path to the direst tragedy of all: a mother trying against hope to save her child, the most beautiful of women pursued by sex cruelty, the gentlest threatened by brute force. How could he save her? He could not, for she would not be saved. He sat there until the dark in the corners crept toward him like fates, their mantles held up in shadowy hands, to