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"But he would never know--never know--I lied to hiht wind

She was lost--lost on earth and to hope of heaven She had right neither to live nor to die She was nothing but a little weed along the trail of life, trale rotten thread in a tangled web of love and hate and revenge And she had broken

Lower and lower she seeulf of despair? If Colter had returned he would have found her a rag and a toy--a creature degraded, fit for his vile embrace To be thrust deeper into the ly for her betrayal of a man's noble love and her oomanhood--to be made an end of, body, mind, and soul

But Colter did not return

The wind mourned, the owls hooted, the leaves rustled, the insects whispered their , the camp-fire flickered and faded Then the wild forestland seemed to close imponderably over Ellen All that she wailed in her despair, all that she confessed in her abaseed to nature If nature had not failed her, had God failed her? It was there--the lonely land of tree and fern and flower and brook, full of wild birds and beasts, where the mossy rocks could speak and the solitude had ears, where she had always felt herself unutterably a part of creation Thus a wavering spark of hope quivered through the blackness of her soul and gathered light

The gloo clouds of dull shade, split asunder to show a glily white, cold, pure, a steadfast eye of the universe, beyond all understanding and illi of the past and the present and the future Ellen watched it until the drifting clouds once ht

What had that star to do with hell? She ht be crushed and destroyed by life, but was there not so beyond? Just to be born, just to suffer, just to die--could that be all? Despair did not loose its hold on Ellen, the strife and pang of her breast did not subside But with the long hours and the strange closing in of the forest around her and the fleeting glimpse of that wonderful star, with a subtle divination of theat her conscience that a reater, nobler, than her faith in God and eternity--with these she checked the dark flight of her soul toward destruction