ith them.

But it was left to the Virgin to give him his final fright. She was
found one morning dead in her cabin. A shot through the head had done
it, and she had left no message, no explanation. Then came the talk.
Some wit, voicing public opinion, called it a case of too much
Daylight. She had killed herself because of him. Everybody knew this,
and said so. The correspondents wrote it up, and once more Burning
Daylight, King of the Klondike, was sensationally featured in the
Sunday supplements of the United States. The Virgin had straightened
up, so the feature-stories ran, and correctly so. Never had she
entered a Dawson City dance-hall. When she first arrived from Circle
City, she had earned her living by washing clothes. Next, she had
bought a sewing-machine and made men's drill parkas, fur caps, and
moosehide mittens. Then she had gone as a clerk into the First Yukon
Bank. All this, and more, was known and told, though one and all were
agreed that Daylight, while the cause, had been the innocent cause of
her untimely end.

And the worst of it was that Daylight knew it was true. Always would
he remember that last night he had seen her. He had thought nothing of
it at the time; but, looking back, he was haunted by every little thing
that had happened. In the light of the tragic event, he could
understand everything--her quietness, that calm certitude as if all
vexing questions of living had been smoothed out and were gone, and
that certain ethereal sweetness about all that she had said and done
that had been almost maternal. He remembered the way she had looked at
him, how she had laughed when he narrated Mickey Dolan's mistake in
staking the fraction on Skookum Gulch. Her laughter had been lightly
joyous, while at the same time it had lacked its oldtime robustness.
Not that she had been grave or subdued. On the contrary, she had been
so patently content, so filled with peace.

She had fooled him, fool that he was. He had even thought that night
that her feeling for him had passed, and he had taken delight in the
thought, and caught visions of the satisfying future friendship that
would be theirs with this perturbing love out of the way.

And then, when he stood at the door, cap in hand, and said good night.
It had struck him at the time as a funny and embarrassing thing, her
bending over his hand and kissing it. He had felt like a fool, but he
shivered now when he looked back on it and fel