Dusk gathered while he worked over his fire. The aroma of boiling coffee rose, crept through the air, blended with the aromas of the woods. He had made toast, holding the bread to the coals upon a sharpened stick. There were strips of crisp bacon garnishing a trout browned to the last painstaking turn. There were fried potatoes, cut by King's pocket-knife into thin strips and turned into gold by the alchemy of cooking. He set out his dishes upon a flat-topped rock, replenished his fire, threw on some fresh-cut green cedar boughs for their delightful fragrance, and went to call Gloria. * * * * * Gloria, too tired bodily and mentally to wage a winning battle against those black vapours which flock so frequently about luckless youth, had suffered and yielded and gone down in misery. She had been crying, just why she knew not; crying because she could not help it. Hers was a state of overwrought nerves which forbade clear thinking, which distorted and warped and magnified. The babble of the water which had been music to King was to her a chorus of jeering voices; the wind in the pines an eerie moaning as of lost spirits wailing; the trees themselves, merging with the dusk, were brooding, shadowy giant things which she suddenly both feared and hated; the cliffs rising against the sky loomed so near and so gigantically tall that she felt as though they were pressing in upon her to suffocate her, to crush her, to annihilate her. The world was turning black with the night; the night rushed, treading out the last gleam of sunlight; even the one star which she had glimpsed through her tears impressed her only with its remoteness. She was frightened; not because of any physical violence, for Mark King stood between her and that. But of vague horrors. She thought of San Francisco; of her own bright room there; of the lights in the streets, of pedestrians and motors and street-cars filling that other steel-cañoned wilderness with familiar noises. And somehow, San Francisco seemed further away, immeasurably further away, than that one remote star blazing through the vastness of space. "A cup of coffee and a bit of supper," King said gently. "You'll feel a lot better." She rose wearily and followed him. Without a word she dropped down beside his banquet, putting out a listless hand to her tin cup. The firelight upon her face showed him her thoughtful eyes; but they were turned not toward him but toward the bed of coals. He had anticipated her lively surprise at the trout; she pushed the brown morsel aside, saying absently: "I am not hungry. It was good of you to go to all of this trouble. I am afraid I am not much of a camper." She forced the shadow of a smile with the admission. "Tuckered out," he thought as he looked into her face across which light and shadow flickered as flame and smoke in the camp-fire came and went fitfully, twisted by the evening breeze. "Clean tuckered out."