thus, her eyes flashing and her lips parted,
the wind had flung a wonderful disarray of curls over her shoulder and
breast. He saw the sunlight in them; in the lampglow they seemed to
move; the throb of her breast seemed to give them life; one hand seemed
about to fling them back from her face; her lips quivered as if about to
speak to him. Against the savage background of mountain and gorge she
stood out clear-cut as a cameo, slender as a reed, wild, palpitating,
beautiful. She was more than a picture. She was life. She was
there--with David in his room--as surely as the woman had been with him
in the coach.

He drew a deep breath and sat back on the edge of his bed. He heard
Father Roland getting into his creaky bed in the adjoining room. Then
came the Missioner's voice.

"Good-night, David."

"Good-night, Father."

For a space after that he sat staring blankly at the log of his room.
Then he leaned over again and held the photograph a second time in the
lampglow. The first strange spell of the picture was broken, and he
looked at it more coolly, more critically, a little disgusted with
himself for having allowed his imagination to play a trick on him. He
turned it over in his hands, and on the back of the cardboard mount he
saw there had been writing. He examined it closely, and made out faintly
the words, "Firepan Creek, Stikine River, August...." and the date was
gone. That was all. There was no name, no word that might give him a
clue as to the identity of the mysterious woman in the coach, or her
relationship to the strange picture she had left in her seat when she
disappeared at Graham.

Once more his puzzled eyes tried to find some solution to the mystery of
this night in the picture of the girl herself, and as he looked,
question after question pounded through his head. What had startled her?
Who had frightened her? What had brought that hunted look--that
half-defiance--into her poise and eyes, just as he had seen the strange
questing and suppressed fear in the eyes and face of the woman in the
coach? He made no effort to answer, but accepted the visual facts as
they came to him. She was young, the girl in the picture; almost a child
as he regarded childhood. Perhaps seventeen, or a month or two older; he
was curiously precise in adding that month or two. Something in the
_woman_ of her as she stood on the rock made it occur to him as
necessary. He saw, now, that she had been wading in the pool, for she