mind had never been opened before.

She cooked the apples and tomatoes, making quite a good meal for
herself. Then she roused Bart, and gave him part of the cooked fruit.

CHAPTER XV.

The darkness closed in about eight o'clock. Ann sat on the doorstep
watching the lights in the sky shine out one by one. Last night had been
the only night which had ever possessed terrors for her, and now that
she believed her father to be still alive she thought no longer with any
horror of his apparition. She wondered where he was wandering, but her
heart hardened towards him. She rested and dozed by turns upon the
doorstep until about midnight. Then in the darkness she heard a voice
from the bracken couch that assured her that Bart's mind had come back
to him again.

"Who is there?" he asked.

"I am going to give you something to eat," she said, letting her voice
speak her name.

"Is it very dark?" he asked, "or am I blind?"

"You can see right enough, Bart," she said gently; "you can watch me
kindle the fire."

She left the door of the stove open while the spruce twigs were
crackling, and in the red, uncertain, dancing light he caught glimpses
of the room in which he was, and of her figure, but the fire died down
very quickly again.

"I was thinking, Ann," he said slowly, "that it was a pity for Christa
to be kept from dancing. She is young and light on her feet. God must
have made her to dance."

"Christa's well enough without it," said Ann, a little shortly.

She thought more coldly of Christa since she had come up to a higher
level herself.

"Well, I only meant about Christa that I think I made a mistake," said
Bart slowly.

"How a mistake?" she asked.

It was a very hard question to answer. A moment before and he thought he
had seen what the mistake was and how to speak, but when he tried, all
that manifold difficulty of applying that which is eternal to that which
is temporal came between his thought and its expression.

He could not know clearly wherein his difficulty lay; no one had taught
him about the Pantheism which obliterates moral distinctions, or told
him of the subjective ideal which sweeps aside material delight. He only
felt after the realities expressed by these phrases, and dimly perceived
that truth lies midway between them, and that truth is the mind of God,
and can only be lived, not spoken. For a while he lay there in the
darkness, trying to think how he could tell Ann that to his ey