Rod found work in a logging camp a thing that tried his vigorous young body to the utmost until he hardened somewhat to the task and learned what every manual laborer must learn,--to strike a gait he could hold all day and not one that sapped his energy in two hours. He found a relief he had not expected in physical exertion. He could stop thinking about Mary Thorn. He took to work as some men take to whisky when a dumb ache oppresses them or some haunting memory will not let them be. And Mary Thorn did haunt him so long as he could look across from Hawk's Nest at that weathered cedar house. He told himself that he was a fool to feel that way. But logic had nothing to do with feeling. Irrational or not, it existed. Something in him had burned up full flame. Love, the mating instinct, whatever it was, had settled upon an object and refused to be directed elsewhere. There was more than sex involved. He did not know precisely what else, but he was sure of something above and beyond the urge of the flesh, however strong that might be. Because he couldn't say to himself that there were other girls and be consoled. Another girl wouldn't do. He couldn't rid himself of the notion that he and Mary Thorn were made for each other. His mind went questing forward and backward and verified the emotional prompting. They had been shaping their own destiny for years. Or was it being shaped for them? He couldn't decide. But he could trace some indefinable influence drawing them together since childhood. There had always been a subtle pleasure in being together, a community of personal interest, a flowing of thoughts and feelings along the same channel that transcended the material factors in their lives. The material factors were prying them apart now. Rod saw that. He knew Mary's inflexibility once she determined on a given course. He had beaten his will against that in simple, childish matters. She would not be driven. She would walk her own road. She had always been a silently determined, lovable little devil, Rod told himself sadly. She was herself uniquely, neither a pattern nor an echo, and he would have loved her for that alone in a world where girls were very largely patterns or echoes, armed for conquest in the arena of men with the sole weapon of their sex. Rod would say to himself that she was wrong, that money and caste and social privilege made no difference. But his mind was too acute not to see that she was right. Where he differed from her, what he resented most was her conviction of the importance of these things to him. That resentment kept him away from Mary Thorn as much as her positive refusal. He was too much the youthful egotist not to believe he could ultimately break that down. But he did not wish to coerce her, even through her own affection, until he saw a breach in the Norquay wall through which they could walk together.