rew a deep breath as the sunlight flooded her face and hair.

"I have my own name for that place," she said. "I call it the Valley of
Silent Things. It is a great swamp, and they say that the moss grows in
it so deep that caribou and deer walk over it without breaking through."

The stream was swelling out into a narrow, finger-like lake that
stretched for a mile or more ahead of them, and she turned to nod her
head at the spruce and cedar shores with their colourings of red and
gold, where birch, and poplar, and ash splashed vividly against the
darker background.

"From now on it is all like that." she said. "Lake after lake, most of
them as narrow as this, clear to the doors of Adare House. It is a
wonderful lake country, and one may easily lose one's self--hundreds of
lakes, I guess, running through the forests like Venetian canals."

"I would not be surprised if you told me you had been in Venice," he
replied. "To-day is your birthday--your twentieth. Have you lived all
those years here?"

He repressed his desire to question her, because he knew that she
understood that to be a part of his promise to her. In what he now
asked her he could not believe that he was treading upon prohibited
ground, and in the face of their apparent innocence he was dismayed at
the effect his words had upon her. It seemed to him that her eyes
flinched when he spoke, as if he had struck at her. There passed over
her face the look which he had come to dread: a swift, tense betrayal
of the grief which he knew was eating at her soul, and which she was
fighting so courageously to hide from him. It had come and gone in a
flash, but the pain of it was left with him. She smiled at him a bit
tremulously.

"I understand why you ask that," she said, "and it is no more than fair
that I should tell you. Of course you are wondering a great deal about
me. You have just asked yourself how I could ever hear of such a place
as Venice away up here among the Indians. Why, do you know"--she leaned
forward, as if to whisper a secret, her blue eyes shilling with a
sudden laughter--"I've even read the 'Lives' of Plutarch, and I'm
waiting patiently for the English to bang a few of those terrible
Lucretia Borgias who call themselves militant suffragettes!"

"I--I--beg your pardon," he stammered helplessly.

She no longer betrayed the hurt of his question, and so sweet was the
laughter of her eyes and lips that he laughed back at her, in spite of
his emba