happen.

Yet, in spite of all her effort, they disagreed twice more before they left the Mariposa Grove. Bertha began to see Walt as he was: brilliant, no doubt, in the single area of physical science, but basically no different from any other man. She desperately wished that she could love him; she earnestly wished that the ideal, fixed so long in her mind, might be destroyed.

But slowly she saw the miracle slip away from her. That night, after the fire-fall, Walt did not ask her to go with him to the lecture. Miserable and angry, Bertha Kent went into her tent, but not to sleep.

She lay staring at the night sky, and thinking how ugly the pin-point lights of distant suns were on the velvet void. As the hours passed, she heard the clatter of pans and voices as people at the other campsites retired. She heard Walt when he returned, whistling tunelessly. He banged around for nearly an hour in the camp next to hers. He dropped a stack of pans; he overturned a box of food; he tripped over a tent line. She wondered if he were drunk. Had their quarreling driven him to that? Walt must have loved her, then.

After a time all the Coleman lanterns in the camp were out. Still Bertha Kent did not sleep. The acid grief and bitterness tormented her with the ghost of another failure, another shattered dream. She listened to the soft music of the flowing stream, the gentle whisper of summer wind in the pines, but it gave her no peace.

Suddenly she heard quiet footsteps and the crackling of twigs behind her tent. She was terrified. It must be Walt. If he had come home drunk, he could have planned almost any kind of violence by way of revenge.

The footsteps moved closer. Bertha shook off the paralysis of fear and reached for her electric lantern. She flashed the beam into the darkness. She saw the black bulk of a bear who was pawing through her food box.

She was so relieved she forgot that a bear might also be a legitimate cause of fear. She ran from the tent, swinging the light and shooing the animal away as she would have chased a puppy. The bear swung toward her, roaring and clawing at the air. She backed away. The bear swung its paws again, and her food box shattered on the ground, in a crescendo of sound.

Bertha heard rapid footsteps under the pines. In the pale moonlight she saw Walt. He was wearing only a pair of red-striped boxer shorts. He was swinging his arms and shouting, but the noise of the falling box had 

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