erstanding with it. Among these was Beatrice Neilson, and
she herself did not fully understand the dreams and longings that swept
her ever at the fall of the mysterious wilderness night.

The forest had never grown old to her. Its mystery was undying. Born in
its shadow, her love had gone out to it in her earliest years, and it
held her just as fast to-day. All her dreams--the natural longings of an
imaginative girl born to live in an uninhabited portion of the
earth--were inextricably bound up in it; whatever plans she had for the
future always included it. Not that she was blind to its more terrible
qualities: its might and its utter remorselessness that all foresters,
sooner or later, come to recognize. Her thews were strong, and she loved
it all the more for the tests that it put to its children.

She was a daughter of the forests, and its mark was on her. To-night the
same moon that, a thousand miles to the south, was lighting the way for
Ben and Ezram on their northern journey, shone on her as she hastened
down the long, shadowed street toward her father's shack, revealing her
forest parentage for all to see. The quality could be discerned in her
very carriage--swift and graceful and silent--vaguely suggesting that of
the wild creatures themselves. But there was no coarseness or ruggedness
about her face and form such as superficial observation might have
expected. Physically she was like a deer, strong, straight-limbed,
graceful, slender rather than buxom, dainty of hands and feet. A perfect
constitution and healthful surroundings had done all this. And good
fairies had worked further magic: as she passed beneath the light at the
door of the rude hotel there was revealed an unquestioned and rather
startling facial beauty.

It seemed hardly fitting in this stern, rough land--the soft contour and
delicacy of the girl's features. It had come straight from her mother, a
woman who, in gold-rush days, had been the acknowledged beauty of the
province. Nor was it merely the attractive, animal beauty that is so
often seen in healthy, rural girls. Rather its loveliness was of a
mysterious, haunting kind that one associates with old legends and far
distant lands.

Perhaps its particular appeal lay in her eyes. They seemed to be quite
marvelously deep and clear, so darkly gray that they looked black in
certain lights, and they were so shadowed and pensive that sometimes
they gave the image of actual sadness. For all the i