Sard, moving wistfully under the great trees, looked up into the branches spread over her. "What are your laws?" she asked as of old. The girl, hot with surging new things, with new blind impulses and passions, asked but one thing, to be true to a law, to the highest laws of all, yet the great law that called men and women fiercely, insistently to each other seemed to be set forever at variance with other laws, laws that those same men and women themselves had made and sustained. What should one be faithful to, what repudiate? "What shall be my laws?" whispered the girl. She felt trembling that fierce law of blood and ardent spirit that bade her follow Colter now, get to him if she could, this night! Sard looked up, her eyes wide, her body swept on the tidal streams of summer night, her tremulous being still vibrated to the remembered clasp of a man's hand, of the sense of mystery surrounding that man, his unuttered call to her.... His truth for her truth. The isolation of youth, such as Sard's, is very great. No human hand can help it. It walks a way of loneliness that glimmers and is drenched with strange lights that bewilder and if it comes to any help at all it is the knowledge of the glory of loneliness, the glory of the fighter, who at last prefers the sense of ambush and the hazard of the wrong trail. Who prefers to pierce the jungle and fight his way out into a clearing--alone. Yet to those who question the night, that time when the earth is abandoned by its one angel, the sun, there comes inevitably out of the dreaming quiet the one word, Patience. "Our law is Patience," said the trees to Sard. The girl, a swift hand passed over her eyes, went in by way of the terrace; she passed the dark form sitting there; half pushing herself, half afraid she tiptoed toward it, to make peace, to ask forgiveness. Then, as softly, she tiptoed back; for deep in her heart Sard knew that there would be only one condition of forgiveness, that she repudiate the best and dearest thing that had come into her life, she must give up Colter. Now passion swept over against any calm she could win, the girl saw vehemently that one man's face with the look of gentleness and dumb pain. "I can't give him up," she said fiercely. Sard drew a long breath; she began climbing slowly up-stairs to bed. As she stood at the foot of the tower room stairs the hall clock struck eleven; there was a sudden whir of wheels and lights on the drive outside; she heard indistinctly lowered voices of men, some long thing, covered, was taken to the kitchen, sudden stir and commotion ran like wild fire through the house.