Eve enjoyed (and suffered from) a hint of this latter feeling. She ate a light breakfast (it would be better not to begin starving till she was actually lost in the boundless, trackless forest), selected a light, spiked climbing-stick with a crooked handle, headed for one of the northeasterly mountains, and was soon deep in the shade of the pines and hemlocks. After a few miles, the trail that she followed split and scattered in many directions, like the end of an unravelled rope. She followed an old lumber road for a long way, turned into another that crossed it at an angle of forty-five degrees, took no account of the sun's position in the heavens or of the marked sides of trees. If she came to a high place from which there was a view, she did not look at it. She just kept going--this way and that, up and down. In short, she made a conscious, anxious effort to lose herself. The easterly mountain toward which she had first headed kept bobbing up straight ahead. And always there was the knowledge in the back of her head of the exact location of The Camp, and of all the other landmarks, familiar to her since early youth. "Drag it!" she said, at length, her eyes on the mountain. "I'll climb the old thing, put melancholy aside, and call this a good, if unaccompanied, Sunday." The morning coolness had departed. It was one of those hot, breathless, mountain forenoons that kill the appetite and are usually followed, toward the late afternoon, by violent electrical disturbances. Eve was not as fit as she had supposed, or as she thought. As a matter of fact, she was setting too fast a pace, considering the weather and the angle of the mountain slope; and she was as wet as if she had played several hard sets of tennis with a partner who stood in one corner of the court and let her do all the running. As she climbed, reproaching her wind for being so short, she remembered that the hollow tip of this particular northeastern mountain was filled with a deep pool of water. Nobody had ever called it a lake. The map called it a pond; but it wasn't even that--it was a pool. Springs fed it just fast enough to make up for the evaporation. It had no outlet. It was shaped like a fat letter O. At one end was a little beach of white sand. Indeed, the bottom of the pool was all firm, smooth, and clean, and the whole charming little body of water was surrounded by thick groves of dwarf mountain trees and bushes. Not content with being a perfect replica, in miniature, of a full-grown Adirondack lake, this pool had in its midst an island, a dozen feet in diameter, densely shrubbed and shaded by one diminutive Japanesque pine. When Eve came to the pool, hot, tired, and rather bothered at the thought of the long walk back to camp, she had but the vaguest idea of just why the Lord had placed such a pool on top of a mountain, impelled her to climb that mountain, and made the day so piping hot.