holesome and
self-reliant, fearing nothing alive and as untamed as a yearling range
colt.

She was not beautiful. The winds and sun had left her no complexion to
speak of, but the glory of her red hair, gold-red, with purple sheen,
nothing could tarnish. Her eyes, too, deep blue with rims of gray, that
flashed with the glint of steel or shone with melting light as of the
stars, according to her mood--those Irish, warm, deep eyes of hers were
worth a man's looking at.

Of course, all spoiled her. Ponka and her son Joe grovelled in abjectest
adoration, while her father and all who came within touch of her simply
did her will. Even The Duke, who loved her better than anything else,
yielded lazy, admiring homage to his Little Princess, and certainly,
when she stood straight up with her proud little gold-crowned head
thrown back, flashing forth wrath or issuing imperious commands, she
looked a princess, all of her.

It was a great day and a good day for her when she fished The Sky Pilot
out of the Swan and brought him home, and the night of Gwen's first
"prayers," when she heard for the first time the story of the Man of
Nazareth, was the best of all her nights up to that time. All through
the winter, under The Pilot's guidance, she, with her father, the Old
Timer, listening near, went over and over that story so old now to many,
but ever becoming new, till a whole new world of mysterious Powers
and Presences lay open to her imagination and became the home of great
realities. She was rich in imagination and, when The Pilot read Bunyan's
immortal poem, her mother's old "Pilgrim's Progress," she moved and
lived beside the hero of that tale, backing him up in his fights and
consumed with anxiety over his many impending perils, till she had him
safely across the river and delivered into the charge of the shining
ones.

The Pilot himself, too, was a new and wholesome experience. He was the
first thing she had yet encountered that refused submission, and the
first human being that had failed to fall down and worship. There was
something in him that would not ALWAYS yield, and, indeed, her pride
and her imperious tempers he met with surprise and sometimes with a pity
that verged toward contempt. With this she was not well pleased and not
infrequently she broke forth upon him. One of these outbursts is stamped
upon my mind, not only because of its unusual violence, but chiefly
because of the events which followed. The original