On the one hand, her mind told her that he had done the ungrateful, the treasonable thing. It did not matter that he might have done it through mere lack of finer perception. That was part of his intolerability. On the other hand, her heart ran like a shuttle through a web of his smiles, his illuminations, the shiver, as from a weapon suddenly drawn, of his unexpected presence, even his look when he stood at the door to receive her final good bye. The woof of that web was the sense of vacancy in her--the unconquerable feeling that a thing by which she had lived was utterly lost. And where would he go if she let him go? Ah, the inn was ready, the room was swept. He would go inevitably to Kate Waddington. That would be hard to bear. Sense of justice was strong in Eleanor; she realized the ungenerosity of this emotion while she continued to harbor it. But was there not justice in it after all? Kate Waddington could grasp, could guide, only the worst part of him. Kate Waddington had in her no guidance for the better Bertram Chester, who must be in him somewhere. She hugged this justification to herself. Perhaps it was not right to let him go; perhaps her heart and her duty were as one. A cock quail came out from the chapparal, saw her, and bobbed back; the feet of his flock rustled the twigs. Now he was raising his spring call--"muchacho!" "muchacho!" Clearer and slighter came the call of his mate--"muchacho!" "muchacho!" A ground squirrel shook the laurel-bush at her side, so that its buds brushed her shoulder. The cock quail came back into the pathway, slanted his wise head, plumed in splendor, to find whether she were friend or enemy, saw that she made no move, and fell to foraging among the leaves. She had sat so long and so quietly that the little people of the ground were accepting her as part of the landscape. She began dimly to perceive these things, to take joy in them. And then they colored her mood. What was she but a young, female thing, a vessel of life universal? What was her attraction toward Bertram Chester but a part of the great, holy force which made and moved hills, trees, the little people of hills and trees? What was she, to have resisted the impulse in her because of a few imperfections, a little lack of development in civilized morals? Her perception of nature died away, but the slant which it had given her thoughts persisted. When she felt and spoke as she had done that night in the Man Far Low, she was unwholesome, super-refined, super-civilized--she was proceeding by the hothouse morals which she had learned in books and in European studios. When she felt as she did on that first night under the bay tree, she was wholesome and eternally right. How much greater in her, after all, if she had followed the call, had taken him for the man in him, to develop, to guide as a woman may guide! Ah, by what token could she call him back?