later on, one of those dreary grey afternoons
of late winter, nearly dark already, though still early by the clock,
and the mercury in the thermometers had gone out of sight and stayed
there. Katrine came tripping along a side street on her way back to the
row, warm in her skin coat, and her face all aglow and abloom under her
fur cap. She had turned into the "Swan and Goose" saloon on her way up,
had put in half-an-hour over a game, and won a fat little canvas bag
stuffed with gold dust; had thinned it out somewhat in hot drinks across
the bar, and now, warmed through with rum, and light-hearted, she was
returning with the bag still well lined in her waist-belt.

She had recovered from the great shock of Annie's death. Her nature,
though essentially kind, was not of that soft, tender stamp that
receives deep and painful impressions from other's sufferings. She would
exert herself strenuously for another, as she had done for Annie, but
it was not in her nature to sorrow long or deeply for the irrevocable.
There was a certain hardness and philosophy in her temperament that her
life and surroundings and all her experience had tended to develop. And
in Annie's death there was nothing striking or unusually sad in this
corner of the world, so crowded with scenes of suffering, so filled with
pathos of every form. There were women hoping and waiting, and longing
and starving, in every street of the town, she knew; sickness and sorrow
and death looked her in the eyes from some poor face at every corner.
Annie had been but one poor little unit in the crowd of sufferers, but
one example of the misery of the town, the plague-stricken town, the
town stricken with a curse--the curse of the greed of gold.

Matters had brightened very much in Dawson lately, a new feeling of hope
and fresh life had gone through the town. The weather was less severe,
the days were lengthening, the skies were brighter, the sickness had
died out, and people went about their work looking cheerful again; and
Katrine, freed from her anxieties and nursing, felt her elastic spirits
bound upwards in response to the general brightness of the camp.

She came along humming behind her closed lips, and then suddenly turning
a corner, stopped dead short with a horrified stare in her eyes. She had
come round by one of the lowest dens in the city. Katrine knew it both
inside and out, for there was no place from hut to hut in Dawson that
she was afraid to enter. The d