On a gray October morning when there was already a threat of snow in the air Jimmie went rabbit hunting over the bowl of hills that encircled their little lake. He took no lunch, for he intended to be home before midday. But rabbits are not to be depended on in any weather. Besides, Jimmie followed a fox for two useless, scrambling hours. Therefore it was the middle of the short afternoon when Jimmie came home. The one big bare room which was the house they lived in, and which Augusta's warming, coloring personality alone had made into a home, was cold and dreary even after the brown bleakness of the hills. The fire must have been out for hours. Jimmie was tired and hungry, and he missed Augusta discontentedly. Where could she have gone for all this time? She would not be fishing. It was too cold to sit holding a pole. Then where could she be, and why? He lighted the fire and thought of cooking some bacon. But even the warmth of the fire did not drive away his discontent about Augusta. Suddenly he did not care for bacon. He put it back, and, just to prove that he was miserable, he beat up a bowl of the hated milk and eggs and forced himself to drink it. He went out to the barn to see Donahue. The horse was not there. Augusta must have hitched up and gone down to Jethniah Gamblin's for provisions. Strange that she should not have told him. He had not heard that they were needing things. He went around to the shed, for confirmation of the obvious. Yes, the wagon was gone. The utter desolation of the place fell upon him like a physical chill. Everything that was his was gone. He felt depressed and deserted. And there came upon him a cold foreboding that some day, through his own fault, Augusta would go and leave him thus alone, his lips dry and cracking with the caking ashes of dreams. "Hills of Desire!" he growled, looking around in mockery at the bare trees and the rocky, storm gashed hillsides. He got the axe and went at his woodpile, not with enthusiasm but with hatred. He had some good sized limbs of trees which had been broken off in a recent heavy storm, and it would have been less wasteful and far more easy to have cut them into proper lengths with a saw. But that would by no means have fitted the frame of his temper at that time. He wanted to hack and hew and destroy. And the vicious, swinging axe spoke his mind, while he grumblingly wondered what Augusta could be talking to Jethniah Gamblin about all this time, anyway. And it was a wonder that that bitter tongued old woman in the window had not put a stop to it before now.