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Heldon bowed his head. The other threw open the door of the hut. “Come in here,” he said. They entered. Pierre pointed to a woman’s hat on the table. “Do you know that”? he asked, huskily, for he was moved. But Heldon only nodded dazedly. Pierre continued: “I was to have met Tom Liffey here–to-night. He is not here. You hoped–I suppose–to see your wife in your–home. She is not there. He left a word on paper for me. I have torn it up. Writing is the enemy of man. But I know where he is gone. I know also where your wife has gone.”

Heldon’s face was of a hateful paleness…. They passed out into the night.

“Where are you going”? Heldon said.

“To God’s Playground, if we can get there.”

“To God’s Playground? To the glacier-top? You are mad.”

“No, but he and she were mad. Come on.” Then he whispered something, and Heldon gave a great cry, and they plunged into the woods.

In the morning the people of Little Goshen, looking towards the glacier, saw a flag (they knew afterwards that it was crimson) flying on it. Near it were two human figures. A miner, looking through a field-glass, said that one figure was crouching by the flag-staff, and that it was a woman. The other figure near was a man. As the morning wore on, they saw upon a crag of ice below the sloping glacier two men looking upwards towards the flag. One of them seemed to shriek out, and threw up his hands, and made as if to rush forward; but the other drew him back.

Heldon knew what revenge and disgrace may be at their worst. In vain he tried to reach God’s Playground. Only one man knew the way, and he was dead upon it–with Heldon’s wife: two shameless suicides…. When he came down from the mountain the hair upon his face was white, though that upon his head remained black as it had always been. And those frozen figures stayed there like statues with that other crimson flag: until, one day, a great-bodied wind swept out of the north, and, in pity, carried them down a bottomless fissure.

But long before this happened, The Woman had fled from Little Goshen in the night, and her house was burned to the ground.