myself on these wolves and beat them back. You are giving me a
battle-lust and a hope.... Now I must go."

She released him and forced a smile for his departure, then sank into a
chair--his chair by a paper-littered desk--and her eyes, very wide and
fixed, gazed ahead--at first unseeing. Yet, after an interval they began
to take in this and that detail of the place, where she had never been
before.

This was his office, the workshop in which he carried on his affairs and
the affairs of the concern which had its foundation in unshaken ideals
and high honor. In an intangible fashion its inanimate accessories
reflected something of himself. On one wall, from a generous spread of
moose antlers, hung a rifle and a pair of restrung snowshoes: reminders
of the open woods he loved. There were autographed portraits of many men
whose names were names of achievement, and one, in a morocco frame
surmounted by a gilt crown, attested the personal regard of a reigning
monarch. With clenched hands and a grim determination to divert her mind
from the danger of madness, she went about the walls, reading those
brief tributes to the man she loved. Then she came back and picked up a
gold frame which rested on his desk, where, as he worked, his eyes might
never be long without its view--and she was gazing into her own eyes.
She glanced out across the steep-walled, fog-reeking cañons where
Finance has its center and whence its myriad activities palpitate
through arteries of masonry and nerves of wire. He was out there
somewhere, in the maw of that incalculably destructive machine,
fighting its determination to grind him between its wheels and cogs and
teeth. Mary Burton shuddered and tried by the pressure of her fingers to
still the violent throbbing of her temples.