"We are cut off from everything. My friend does not need me now; she has
gone home,--alone. She is dead!"

Arnold took a long walk upon the hills that night, and smoked a great
many cigars in gloomy meditation. He was thinking of two girls, as young
men who smoke a great many cigars without counting them often are; he was
also thinking of Arizona. He had fully made up his mind to resign, and
depart for that problematic region as soon as his place was filled; but an
alternative had presented itself to him with a pensive attractiveness,--an
alternative unmistakably associated with the fact that the schoolmistress
was to remain in her present isolated circumstances. It even had occurred
to him that there might be some question of duty involved in his "standing
by her," as he phrased it to himself, "till she got her color back." There
was an unconscious appeal in the last words he had heard her speak which
constrained him to do so. He was not in the habit of pitying himself, but
had there been another soul to follow this mental readjustment of himself
to his mutilated life, it would surely have pitied the eagerness with which
he clung to this one shadow of a duty to a fellow-creature. It was the
measure of his loneliness.

It was late in November. The rains had begun again with sound and fury;
with ranks of clouds forming along the mountain sides, and driven before
the sea-winds upward through the gulches; with days of breeze and sunshine,
when the fog veil was lightly lifted and blown apart, showing the valley
always greener; with days of lowering stillness, when the veil descended
and left the mountains alone, like islands of shadow rising from a sea of
misty whiteness.

On such a lowering day, Miss Frances stood at the junction of three trails,