to her with great force when she saw the grizzled miner's face
framed in the porthole of that schooner.

But from the day they landed at Whaling, on the mainland of Siberia,
all thoughts of the letter and the two claimants for its possession
were completely crowded from her mind.

Never in all her adventurous life had Marian experienced anything quite
so thrilling as this life with the Chukches of the Arctic coast of
Siberia.

In Alaska the natives had had missionaries and teachers among them for
thirty years. They had been Americanized and, in a sense,
Christianized. The development of large mining centers to which they
journeyed every summer to beg and barter had tended to rob them of the
romantic wildness of their existence. But here, here where no
missionaries had been allowed nor teachers been sent, where gold
gleamed still ungathered in the beds of the rivers, here the natives
still dwelt in their dome-like houses of poles and skins. Here they
fared boldly forth in search of the dangerous walrus and white bear and
the monstrous whale. Here they made strange fire to the spirits of the
monsters they had slaughtered, and spoke in grave tones of the great
spirit that had come down from the moon in the form of a raven with a
beak of old ivory.

It is little wonder that Marian forgot all thought of fear amid such
surroundings, as she worked industriously at the sketches which were to
furnish her with three years of wonderful study under great masters.

But one day, after six weeks of veritable dream life, as she lifted the
tray to her paint-box her eyes fell on that blue envelope. Instantly a
flood of remembrance rushed through her mind; the frank-faced college
boy, the angry miner, old Rover, the dog, who, sleek and fat on whale
meat, lay curled up beside her, then again the grizzled face of the
miner framed in a port-hole; all these passed before her mind's vision
and left her chilled.

Her hand trembled. She could not control her brush. The sketch of two
native women in deerskin unionsuits, their brown shoulders bared,
working at the task of splitting walrus skins, went unfinished while
she took a long walk down the beach.

That very evening she had news that caused her blood to chill again. A
native had come from East Cape, the next village to the south. He had
seen a white man there, a full-bearded man of middle age. He had said
that he intended coming to Whaling in a few days. He had posed amon