wrong spot. They knew the lake and had told Barbara where to meet them.
In the meantime, however, the important thing was to get home.

Darkness crept across the woods, and as she stumbled along the uneven
trail Grace got disturbed. She felt the daunting loneliness, the quiet
jarred her nerve. The pines looked ghostly in the gloom. They were
ragged and strangely stiff, it looked as if their branches never moved,
and the dark gaps between the trunks were somehow forbidding.

Grace did not like Canada. Her cultivation was artificial, but Canada
was primitive and stern. In the towns, one found inventions that
lightened labor, and brought to the reach of all a physical comfort that
in England only the rich enjoyed, but the contrasts were sharp. One left
one's hotel, with its very modern furniture, noisy elevators and
telephones, and plunged into the wilderness where all was as it had been
from the beginning. Grace shrank from primitive rudeness and hated
adventure. Living by rule she distrusted all she did not know. She
thought it strange that Barbara, who feared nothing, let her go in
front.

They came to a pool. All round, the black tops of the pines cut the sky;
the water was dark and sullen in the gloom. The trail followed its edge
and when a loon's wild cry rang across the woods Grace stopped. She knew
the cry of the lonely bird that haunts the Canadian wilds, but it had a
strange note, like mocking laughter. Grace disliked the loon when its
voice first disturbed her sleep at the fishing camp; she hated it
afterwards.

"Go on!" said Barbara sharply.