ad welcomed them. They had assembled about that
little cabin in which the light was shining, speechless in their
adoration of this woman who had come among them, their caps in their
hands, faces shining, eyes shifting before the glorious ones that
looked at them and smiled at them as the woman shook their hands, one
by one. Perhaps she was not beautiful, as most people judge. But she
was beautiful here--four hundred miles beyond civilization. Mukee, the
half-Cree, had never seen a white woman, for even the factor's wife was
part Chippewayan, and no one of the others went down to the edge of the
southern wilderness more than once each twelve-month or so. Her hair
was brown and soft, and it shone with a sunny glory that reached away
back into their conception of things dreamed of but never seen, her
eyes were as blue as the early snowflowers that came after the spring
floods, and her voice was the sweetest sound that had ever fallen upon
their ears. So these men thought when Cummins first brought home his
wife, and the masterpiece which each had painted in his soul and brain
was never changed. Each week and month added to the deep-toned value of
that picture, as the passing of a century might add to a Raphael or a
Van Dyke. The woman became more human, and less an angel, of course,
but that only made her more real, and allowed them to become acquainted
with her, to talk with her, and to love her more. There was no thought
of wrong--until the Englishman came; for the devotion of these men who
lived alone, and mostly wifeless, was a great passionless love
unhinting of sin, and Cummins and his wife accepted it, and added to it
when they could, and were the happiest pair in all that vast Northland.

The first year brought great changes. The girl--she was scarce more
than budding into womanhood--fell happily into the ways of her new
life. She did nothing that was elementally unusual--nothing more than
any pure woman reared in the love of a God and home would have done. In
her spare hours she began to teach the half dozen wild little children
about the post, and every Sunday told them wonderful stories out of the
Bible. She ministered to the sick, for that was a part of her code of
life. Everywhere she carried her glad smile, her cheery greeting, her
wistful earnestness to brighten what seemed to her the sad and lonely
lives of these silent, worshipful men of the North. And she succeeded,
not because she was unlike other million