bstraction, an abstraction, however, that sometimes worried him, from
the fear that it indicated some unhappiness with her present lot. He was
longing to rejoin her after his absence of three days, the longest time
they had been separated since their marriage, and he hurried on with
a certain lover-like excitement, quite new to his usually calm and
temperate blood.

Struggling with the storm and darkness, but always with the happy
consciousness of drawing nearer to her in that struggle, he labored on,
finding his perilous way over the indistinguishable trail by certain
landmarks in the distance, visible only to his pioneer eye. That heavier
shadow to the right was not the hillside, but the SLOPE to the distant
hill; that low, regular line immediately before him was not a fence or
wall, but the line of distant gigantic woods, a mile from his home. Yet
as he began to descend the slope towards the wood, he stopped and rubbed
his eyes. There was distinctly a light in it. His first idea was that he
had lost the trail and was nearing the woodman Mackinnon's cabin. But a
more careful scrutiny revealed to him that it was really the wood, and
the light was a camp-fire. It was a rough night for camping out, but
they were probably some belated prospectors.

When he had reached the fringe of woodland, he could see quite plainly
that the fire was built beside one of the large pines, and that the
little encampment, which looked quite comfortable and secluded from the
storm-beaten trail, was occupied apparently by a single figure. By the
good glow of the leaping fire, that figure standing erect before it,
elegantly shaped, in the graceful folds of a serape, looked singularly
romantic and picturesque, and reminded Joshua Rylands--whose ideas of
art were purely reminiscent of boyish reading--of some picture in a
novel. The heavy black columns of the pines, glancing out of the concave
shadow, also seemed a fitting background to what might have been a scene
in a play. So strongly was he impressed by it that but for his anxiety
to reach his home, still a mile distant, and the fact that he was
already late, he would have penetrated the wood and the seclusion of the
stranger with an offer of hospitality for the night. The man, however,
was evidently capable of taking care of himself, and the outline of a
tethered horse was faintly visible under another tree. It might be
a surveyor or engineer,--the only men of a better class who were
itiner