And as we tramped along in silence, my mood of self-depreciation, which had seized me on the train, again asserted itself, and my alarmed mentality was saying sternly that it had warned my proud spirit that such catastrophes would be the result of my headlong course of wilfulness, when we came out of the darkness into a clearing where a cabin stood, from which a dim light shone. “Stivers’,” remarked my guide, fluently. “So long,” he added tersely, and disappeared again into the woods by another path. At the time I wondered if he could be troubled by the conventions. I did him an injustice; I know now it was a horse hitched on the other side of the clearing. For more than a few long minutes I stood and pondered with panicky indecision over just what to do, the wood with its nightmares on the one hand, and the unknown on the other. I chose the unknown, and plunged in as I faltered up to the open door of the small two-room hut. Suddenly two doors were shut hurriedly in the darkness, and I heard the scuffling of heavy feet as a man appeared in the flare of the dim candle in the front room and peered at me cautiously. “What do you want?” was the hospitable greeting that issued from the cavern of his huge chest. “Mr. Dudley Gaines,” I answered, using instinctively the name of introduction that I had seen succeed a few minutes earlier. “He ain’t here; but if you are his woman, come in,” was the answer, and as Dudley’s property I entered the Stivers’s abode. Even in my tragic situation for an instant my temper rose. Why should man’s possession justify the existence of a woman in the eyes of the primitive? However, masculine justification of life is a delicious feeling to a woman in a dark and fearful wood and--But I’ll tell you about that later. With becoming gravity and timidity I entered the living-room of the moonshiner’s hut, and weakly seated myself in a chair he pointed out to me in a corner by an open window. “Brat’s got fits, and the woman is out there tending it,” was my host’s ample excuse for the non-appearance of my hostess. At his words my heart jumped and then stood still. I had never been in the house with a fit before, and the feeling was gruesome, coming so close on the heels of the woolly, furry things in the woods. Then as I poised myself on the edge of the chair, holding on tight to keep myself from running out into the night, an eery wail came from the back of the house, and I collapsed on the seat, with a queer, suffocating pain in the place of that jump. I had never noticed a child’s cry before, and something moved in the region of my solar plexus. “Can’t--can’t something be done?” I ventured in desperation.