well to his left, ignoring the invitation of the trail beyond down the
tall walls of Squaw Creek cañon. He went straight down the long pitch of
the mountain, heading tenaciously toward the tiny lakelet which, so far
as he knew, had been nameless until his old friend Ben Gaynor had built
a summer home there two years ago and had christened the pond among the
trees. Lake Gloria! Mark King liked the appellation little enough,
telling himself with thorough-going unreason that there was a silly name
to fit to perfection a silly girl, but altogether out of place to tie on
to an unspoiled Sierra lake. Ben would have done a better job in naming
it Lake Vanity. Or Self-Regard. King could think of a score of
designations more to the point. For though he had never so much as set
his eyes on either Gloria or her mother, he had his own opinion of both
of them. Nor did he in the least realize that that opinion was based
rather less on actual knowledge than moulded by his own peculiar form of
jealousy, that jealousy which one time-tried friend feels when the other
allows love of women to occupy a higher place than friendship.

He made his camp at eight o'clock in a sheltered spot among the firs. He
built a fire, made a mat of boughs, wrapped himself up in his canvas,
and went promptly to sleep. He awoke cold, got his blood running by
stamping about, put on fresh fuel and went to sleep again, his feet
toward the blaze. Half a dozen times he was up during the night; before
dawn he had his coffee boiling; before the sun was up he was well on his
way again, driving the cramped chill out of him by walking vigorously.
And at nine o'clock that morning he stood on the bench of a timbered
slope whence, looking downward through the trees, he got his first
glimpse of Lake Gloria and of the rambling log house which Ben Gaynor
had been prevailed on to build here in the wild, a dozen miles from the
Lake Tahoe road.