"Our home is yours just as long as you can bear the monotony of our simple lives," he said, in his quiet way, but it was deep-throated and unmistakable in its sincerity. She laid her hand on his arm and clasped it hard, then turned away her head, and they rode in silence. After they left the car Allen sat, with savage eyes and grimly set mouth, going over the problem again and again. He saw that young and helpless creature walking the gantlet between endless ranks of lustful, remorseless men, snatching at her in selfish, bestial desire. It made him bitter and despairing to think that women should be helpless--that they should need some man to protect them against some other man. He cursed the laws and traditions that had kept women subordinate and trivial and deceptive and vacillating. He wished they could be raised to the level of the brutes till, like the tigress or she-wolf, they could not only defend themselves, but their young. He tried to breathe a sigh of relief that she had gone out of his life, but he could not. It was not so easy to shake off the shadow of his responsibility. He followed her in imagination on her downward path till he saw her stretching out her hands in pitiful need to casual acquaintances--alone and without hope; still petite, still dainty in spite of all, still with flashes of wit, and then-- He shuddered. "O my God! Upon whom does the burden of guilt lie?" * * * * * On the night of his return he sat among his romping babes, debating whether he should tell the story to his wife or not. As the little ones grew weary the noise of the autumn wind--the lonely, woful, moaning prairie wind--came to his ears, and he shuddered. His wife observed it. "What is it, Joe? Did you get a chill?" "Oh no. The wind sounds a little lonesome to-night, that's all." But he took his little girl into his arms and held her close. AN ALIEN IN THE PINES I A man and a woman were pacing up and down the wintry station platform, waiting for a train. On every side the snow lay a stained and crumpled blanket, with here and there a light or a chimney to show the village sleeping beneath. The sky was a purple-black hemisphere, out of which the stars glittered almost white. The wind came out of the west, cold but amiable; the cracked bell of a switch-engine gurgled querulously at intervals, followed by the bumping of coupling freight-cars; roosters were crowing, and sleepy train-men were assembling in sullen silence. The couple walked with arms locked like lovers, but the tones of their voices had the quality which comes after marriage. They were man and wife. The woman's clear voice arose. "Oh, Ed, isn't this delicious? What one misses by not getting up early!" "Sleep, for instance," laughed her husband. "Don't drag me down. You know what I mean. Let's get up early every morning while we're up here in the woods."