ng the trooper to make an extra trip across the
river and back in order to maintain the fiction. Stonor slept in his own
camp for an hour, and then rowed down-stream and across, to land in
front of the Mission.

It is never perfectly dark at this season, and already day was beginning
to break. Stonor climbed the bank, and showed himself at the top,
knowing that they would be on the watch from within. The little grey log
mission-house crouched in its neglected garden behind a fence of broken
palings. But a touch of regeneration was already visible in Miss
Pringle's geranium slips in the windows, and her bits of white curtain.

The door was silently opened, and the two women kissed in the entry.
Stonor was never to forget that picture in the still grey light. Clare,
clad in the little Norfolk suit and the boy's stout boots and hat,
crossed the yard with the little mincing steps so characteristic of her,
and therefore so charming to the man who waited. Her face was pale, her
eyes bright. Miss Pringle stood in the doorway, massive and tearful, a
hand pressed to her mouth.

Stonor's breast received a surprising wrench. "It's like an elopement!"
he thought. "Ah, if she _were_ coming to me!"

She smiled at him without speaking, and handed over her bag. Stonor
closed the gate softly, and they made their way down the bank, and got
in the boat.

It was a good, stiff pull back against the current. They spoke little.
Clare studied his grim face with some concern.

"Regrets?" she asked.

He rested on his oars for a moment and his face softened. He smiled at
her frankly--and ruefully. "No regrets," he said, "but a certain amount
of anxiety."

His glance conveyed a good deal more than that--in spite of him. "I love
you with all my heart. Of course I clearly understand that you have
nothing for me. I am prepared to see this thing through, no matter what
the end means to me.--But be merciful!" All this was in his look.
Whether she got it or not, no man could have told. She looked away and
dabbled her hand in the water.

Mary Moosa was a self-respecting squaw who lived in a house with tables
and chairs and went to church and washed her children with soap. In her
plain black cotton dress, the skirt cut very full to allow her to ride
astride, her new moccasins and her black straw hat she made a figure of
matronly tidiness if not of beauty. She was cooking when they arrived.
Her inward astonishment, at beholding Stonor returning