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His next visit was a day or two delayed, and in her anxiety she had ventured as far as the highway to earnestly watch for his coming. From her hiding-place in the underwood she could see the team and Jim Hoskins already waiting for him. Presently she saw him drive up to the trail in a carryall with a party of ladies and gentlemen. He alighted, bade “Good-by” to the party, and the team turned to retrace its course. But in that single moment she had been struck and bewildered by what seemed to her the dazzlingly beautiful apparel of the women, and their prettiness. She felt a sudden consciousness of her own coarse, shapeless calico gown, her straggling hair, and her felt hat, and a revulsion of feeling seized her. She crept like a wounded animal out of the underwood, and then ran swiftly and almost fiercely back towards the cabin. She ran so fast that for a time she almost kept pace with the doctor and Hoskins in the wagon on the distant trail. Then she dived into the underwood again, and making a short cut through the forest, came at the end of two hours within hailing distance of the cabin,–footsore and exhausted, in spite of the strange excitement that had driven her back. Here she thought she heard voices–his voice among the rest–calling her, but the same singular revulsion of feeling hurried her vaguely on again, even while she experienced a foolish savage delight in not answering the summons. In this erratic wandering she came upon the spring she had found on her first entrance in the forest a year ago, and drank feverishly a second time at its trickling source. She could see that since her first visit it had worn a great hollow below the tree roots and now formed a shining, placid pool. As she stooped to look at it, she suddenly observed that it reflected her whole figure as in a cruel mirror,–her slouched hat and loosened hair, her coarse and shapeless gown, her hollow cheeks and dry yellow skin,–in all their hopeless, uncompromising details. She uttered a quick, angry, half-reproachful cry, and turned again to fly. But she had not gone far before she came upon the hurrying figures and anxious faces of the doctor and Hoskins. She stopped, trembling and irresolute.

“Ah,” said the doctor, in a tone of frank relief. “Here you are! I was getting worried about you. Waya said you had been gone since morning!” He stopped and looked at her attentively. “Is anything the matter?”

His evident concern sent a warm glow over her chilly frame, and yet the strange sensation remained. “No–no!” she stammered.

Doctor Ruysdael turned to Hoskins. “Go back and tell Waya I’ve found her.”

Libby felt that the doctor only wanted to get rid of his companion, and became awed again.

“Has anybody been bothering you?”

“No.”

“Have the diggers frightened you?”

“No”–with a gesture of contempt.

“Have you and Waya quarreled?”

“Nary”–with a faint, tremulous smile.

He still stared at her, and then dropped his blue eyes musingly. “Are you lonely here? Would you rather go to San Jose?”

Like a flash the figures of the two smartly dressed women started up before her again, with every detail of their fresh and wholesome finery as cruelly distinct as had been her own shapeless ugliness in the mirror of the spring. “No! NO!” she broke out vehemently and passionately. “Never!”

He smiled gently. “Look here! I’ll send you up some books. You read–don’t you?” She nodded quickly. “Some magazines and papers. Odd I never thought of it before,” he added half musingly. “Come along to the cabin. And,” he stopped again and said decisively, “the next time you want anything, don’t wait for me to come, but write.”

A few days after he left she received a package of books,–an odd collection of novels, magazines, and illustrated journals of the period. She received them eagerly as an evidence of his concern for her, but it is to be feared that her youthful nature found little satisfaction in the gratification of fancy. Many of the people she read of were strange to her; many of the incidents related seemed to her mere lies; some tales which treated of people in her own sphere she found profoundly uninteresting. In one of the cheaper magazines she chanced upon a fashion plate; she glanced eagerly through all the others for a like revelation until she got a dozen together, when she promptly relegated the remaining literature to a corner and oblivion. The text accompanying the plates was in a jargon not always clear, but her instinct supplied the rest. She dispatched by Hoskins a note to Doctor Ruysdael: “Please send me some brite kalikers and things for sewing. You told me to ask.” A few days later brought the response in a good-sized parcel.