"Bruce," he said simply. It did not even occur to him to use the surname of Duncan. It was a name of a time and sphere already forgotten. "I don't know what my real last name is." "Bruce--Bruce," the woman whispered. She stretched a palsied hand to him as if it would feel his flesh to reassure her of its reality. The wild light in her eyes pierced him, burning like chemical rays, and a great flood of feeling yet unknown and unrecognized swept over him. He saw her snags of teeth as her dry lips half-opened. He saw the exultation in her wrinkled, lifted face. "Oh, praises to His Everlasting Name!" she cried. "Oh, Glory--Glory to on High!" And this was not blasphemy. The words came from the heart. No matter how terrible the passion from which they sprang, whether it was such evil as would cast her to hell, such a cry as this could not go unheard. The strength seemed to go out of her as water flows. She rocked on her cane, and Bruce, thinking she was about to fall, seized her shoulders. "At last--at last," she cried. "You've come at last." She gripped herself, as if trying to find renewed strength. "Go at once," she said, "to the end of the Pine-needle Trail. It leads from behind the cabin." He tried to emerge from the dreamlike mists that had enveloped him. "How far is it?" he asked her steadily. "To the end of Pine-needle Trail," she rocked again, clutched for one of his brown hands, and pressed it between hers. Then she raised it to her dry lips. Bruce could not keep her from it. And after an instant more he did not attempt to draw it from her embrace. In the darkness of that mountain cabin, in the shadow of the eternal pines, he knew that some great drama of human life and love and hatred was behind the action; and he knew with a knowledge unimpeachable that it would be only insolence for him to try further to resist it. Its meaning went too deep for him to see; but it filled him with a great and wondering awe. Then he turned away, up the Pine-needle Trail. Clear until the deeper forest closed around him her voice still followed him,--a strange croaking in the afternoon silence. "At last," he heard her crying. "At last, at last." VIII