With Thorpe, however, her suspicions had been lulled. There is something virile and genuine about the woods and the men who inhabit them that strongly predisposes the mind to accept as proved in their entirety all the other virtues. Hilda had fallen into this state of mind. She endowed each of the men whom she encountered with all the robust qualities she had no difficulty in recognizing as part of nature's charm in the wilderness. Now at a word her eyes were opened to what she had done. She saw that she had assumed unquestioningly that her lover possessed the qualities of his environment. Not for a moment did she doubt the reality of her love. She had conceived one of those deep, uplifting passions possible only to a young girl. But her cynical experience warned her that the reality of that passion's object was not proven by any test besides the fallible one of her own poetizing imagination. The reality of the ideal she had constructed might be a vanishable quantity even though the love of it was not. So to the interview that ensued she brought, not the partiality of a loving heart, nor even the impartiality of one sitting in judgment, but rather the perverted prejudice of one who actually fears the truth. “Will you tell me for what you want the money?” she asked. The young man caught the note of distrust. At once, instinctively, his own confidence vanished. He drew within himself, again beyond the power of justifying himself with the needed word. “The firm needs it in the business,” said he. Her next question countered instantaneously. “Does the firm need the money more than you do me?” They stared at each other in the silence of the situation that had so suddenly developed. It had come into being without their volition, as a dust cloud springs up on a plain. “You do not mean that, Hilda,” said Thorpe quietly. “It hardly comes to that.” “Indeed it does,” she replied, every nerve of her fine organization strung to excitement. “I should be more to you than any firm.” “Sometimes it is necessary to look after the bread and butter,” Thorpe reminded her gently, although he knew that was not the real reason at all. “If your firm can't supply it, I can,” she answered. “It seems strange that you won't grant my first request of you, merely because of a little money.” “It isn't a little money,” he objected, catching manlike at the practical question. “You don't realize what an amount a clump of pine like this stands for. Just in saw logs, before it is made into lumber, it will be worth about thirty thousand dollars,--of course there's the expense of logging to pay out of that,” he added, out of his accurate business conservatism, “but there's ten thousand dollars' profit in it.”