“Get right into the rig, and I’ll unpack your lunch,” he exclaimed solicitously, assisting me over the wheel. “I only learned of this infernal outrage by accident. I landed a rather unusual order this morning and, leaving your husband on the job to sketch the preliminaries, drove back to meet the wagon and rush along the necessary supplies. What was my surprise to find you missing. My wife and I had a beautiful row while I was putting up this lunch and starting back to look for you. She’s gone ahead now, to take that new lot of letters to your husband.” He had turned the team around as he spoke and was driving rapidly along the western track. Then I looked up from my meal in surprise, for he had swung into a narrow trail leading away to the north. “What’s the idea?” I inquired. “Aren’t you taking the wrong turning?” “There is a little spring up here a mile or so where we’ll stop to feed and water the horses. They’ve been jogging pretty steadily since early this morning.” It was true. The poor beasts were in need of food and water, and I was glad when we drew up at a tiny stream, which flowed through the bottom of a ravine, where we could enjoy the protecting shade of a few straggling willows. Mr. Adams unharnessed the sweat-stained animals, allowed them a swallow or two of water and spread a flake of baled hay for them to munch until cool enough to eat their grain. I had settled myself beneath a tree and had just finished my lunch when he threw himself down beside me. “Ethel,” he began, “you are too fine a woman for the kind of life you are leading. I love you, dear. Won’t you let me take you away and give you all the beautiful things that belong to you?” I gazed at him a moment in silence. “Aren’t you forgetting yourself, Mr. Adams?” I inquired coldly. “How about your wife?” “Oh, that woman. She is not my wife, and she has no hold on me whatever. Why she was running an assignation house in Detroit when I picked her up. Let her go back where she came from.” “And you can live with a woman for more than two years, share the burdens of the road, eat at the same campfire, travel with her as your wife, and then dismiss her with a wave of the hand? You may consider yourself free perhaps, but I am a married woman and, besides, I love my husband.” “You think you love him, no doubt, and maybe you do—now. But who knows how long that love will last? You yourself admit that love is the only legitimate basis for marriage. Your love for your husband may die to-morrow as the love of thousands of other women has done. Love is free as the wind, it comes and goes without reason, without warning, without restraint.