The trouble was that the woman was discontented in marriage--as she would have been discontented in singleness, or discontented in jail, or discontented in what was her idea of heaven. She was looking for diversion, and her discontent took the form of imagining herself to be sadly and irretrievably in love with Wardwell. (If she had been obliged to live two weeks in a cabin with him she would have come to the point of murdering him.) Not long after he had sent the telegram and received his money Jimmie had begun to be troubled with a sharp premonition of something wrong. Something was brewing up for him somewhere. He was quick to understand that the one contact which he had established with the world without was probably the source of his worry. He mooned around for a day or so, waiting for something to drop, as he put it to himself. Then he went fearfully down to the station. There were six letters waiting for him. He read the last first. It seemed that the woman had somehow learned that Wardwell had gone away sick. From the last of the letters he gathered that she had pictured him to herself as lying penniless and alone, and at the point of death, somewhere in the woods, and that she was about to fly to him. She was capable of doing it, he knew. With the choking, hopeless feeling of a man being drowned, he wondered if she had already started. In his panic he telegraphed: _Do not come. Am leaving here._ No sooner was the wire gone than he repented the last words of it. Why had he lied? He should not have lied, for it would only lead to other lies. The woman was one to revel in mysteries, and his evading her now would merely determine her to come and search him out. He was not going away from here, and he should not have lied to say so. Now he would have to write, at once, and take back the lie. Then and there he borrowed paper and wrote. He told her, circumstantially, that he was in perfect health. He explained that he and his wife--the woman evidently had not thought of the possibility of his being married--were living away up here in the woods in order that they might be able to go on with their writing without interruptions. He apologized abjectly for having annoyed her. He hoped that she would remember that only a temporary and acute crisis had made him trouble her, and at the same time he hoped that she would forget the whole matter. The letter was so unlike his usual clear handed methods that he felt sure the lady would either think him deranged or that she would disbelieve the whole of it. But he sent the letter. At any rate he must try to keep her from coming here. Then he started home to Augusta, dragging with him a weight of hang-dog misery that increased at every step.