He got his overcoat on and put on his hat. He stood a long time with a solemn expression on his face. He blinked studiously. He had become steadier. A fixed purpose seemed to have got him under its control. With great care he buttoned the overcoat and settled his hat as straight on his head as he could. Now his eyes were no longer blurred and wavering. They glowed as with fever and a flame was mounting in his cheeks. But his mouth was a woeful thing, a wound that opened and shut, writhing. He picked up the revolver and looked at it, smirking. With the smirk on his face he turned toward the door and began to shove the revolver down into the inside pocket of his overcoat. “We know,” he said, wagging at the door. “We know where--” The trigger of the revolver must have caught in some part of his clothing. The crash of the discharge tore the wavering smirk from his face. Piteously intent, he stared for a second at the door. Then he lay quickly down, as if he accepted everything. He lay first on his face, and muzzled his face snugly between his hands. Presently he turned over quietly on his back. One hand knocked once or twice against the floor. The look fixed on his countenance was the look of one who has at last discovered something real. [6] Copyright, 1921, by _Broom_. Copyright, 1923, by Frederick Booth. FOREST COVER[7] By EDNA BRYNER (From _The Bookman, N. Y._) The ribbon of road wound down through the forest. A woman followed it. The road seemed to come from the town of a thousand souls but it only came through there, just as it came through forest on the other side of the town, and through another town on the other side of the forest, and through forest again on the other side of that town. The woman followed the road just that way. At some time or other she had stepped out upon it from some place through which it came and ever since she had been following it. Somewhere she would stop following it, she would make an end of it. The road itself would go on, ceaselessly, in and out of forest, through towns and again through forest. As the woman walked, a sharp, long needle of words, “No one must ever know,” drove itself in and out of her brain. The words made a thin pattern that spread out sprawlingly to form a lid, like the pan of some cunning trap, which shut down automatically over every projection of thought that tried to make of her an articulate being, conscious of her own exigency. At the same time, something of her beyond the reach of words, finely hidden away from all snares, escaped like a thin cloud and entered the forest, crept along the dark leaf-mold earth, over the mossed rocks, up the dark, strong trunks of trees, out to the tips of the branches, to the edges of the leaves, swaying there until by its own motion it was dissipated--and again she was a woman walking along a piece of road.