was
all she said, head bowed on knee in resignation.

Then it was a splendid thought came to her, and at the wonder of it
she was all aglow. She went down to the stream and washed the dried
clay from her face. When the ripples died away, she stared long at her
mirrored features; but sun and weather-beat had done their work, and,
what of roughness and bronze, her skin was not soft and dimpled as a
child's. But the thought was still splendid and the glow unabated as
she crept in beside her husband under the sleeping-robe.

She lay awake, staring up at the blue of the sky and waiting for Canim
to sink into the first deep sleep. When this came about, she wormed
slowly and carefully away, tucked the robe around him, and stood up.
At her second step, Bash growled savagely. She whispered persuasively
to him and glanced at the man. Canim was snoring profoundly. Then she
turned, and with swift, noiseless feet sped up the back trail.

Mrs. Evelyn Van Wyck was just preparing for bed. Bored by the duties
put upon her by society, her wealth, and widowed blessedness, she had
journeyed into the Northland and gone to housekeeping in a cosey cabin
on the edge of the diggings. Here, aided and abetted by her friend and
companion, Myrtle Giddings, she played at living close to the soil,
and cultivated the primitive with refined abandon.

She strove to get away from the generations of culture and parlor
selection, and sought the earth-grip her ancestors had forfeited.
Likewise she induced mental states which she fondly believed to
approximate those of the stone-folk, and just now, as she put up her
hair for the pillow, she was indulging her fancy with a palaeolithic
wooing. The details consisted principally of cave-dwellings and
cracked marrow-bones, intersprinkled with fierce carnivora, hairy
mammoths, and combats with rude flaked knives of flint; but the
sensations were delicious. And as Evelyn Van Wyck fled through
the sombre forest aisles before the too arduous advances of her
slant-browed, skin-clad wooer, the door of the cabin opened, without
the courtesy of a knock, and a skin-clad woman, savage and primitive,
came in.

"Mercy!"

With a leap that would have done credit to a cave-woman, Miss Giddings
landed in safety behind the table. But Mrs. Van Wyck held her ground.
She noticed that the intruder was laboring under a strong excitement,
and cast a swift glance backward to assure herself that the way was
clear to the bunk, wh