es wide-eyed, to creep away and
watch the stars, to dream of those dashing streams and to clinch her
hands for that she was not born a man.

And then when she was fifteen had come the day when the tales had at
last kindled to flame the parent fire of that wildness in her which
slept unsuspected in the breast of the blacksmith, then old as the way
of life runs, and he had closed his cabin and his forge, given his two
motherless girls to the wife of Jacques Baptiste, joined a party going
into the wilderness, and gone out of their lives.

Eleven years had passed with its varied life, at Grand Portage and he
had never returned,--only vague rumors that had sunk in tears the
head of gentle Marie, the younger of the two sisters, and lifted with
sympathetic understanding that of Maren the elder.

Why not? She had asked herself in the starlit nights of those years, why
not? All their lives he had been a good father to them, taking the place
of the mother dead since she could just remember, speeding with tap and
stroke of his humble craft those luckier ones who streamed through the
stirring headquarters of Grand Portage at the mouth of Pigeon River each
season, going into that untracked region of romance and dreams where the
call of his still sturdy manhood had beckoned him,--how long none might
know. And at last he had heeded, laid down the staid, the sane, and
followed the will-o'-the-wisp of conquest and adventure that took the
current by his door.

Never had Maren chided him,--never for one moment held against him the
desertion of his children. For that, they were well provided for since
he had left with Jacques Baptiste the savings of his life, not much, but
enough to bring both of them to the marriage age.

And well and tenderly had old Jacques and his wife fulfilled the
trust,--Maren's dark eyes were often misty as she recalled the parting
at Grand Portage.

So tenderly had the two maids grown in the love of the family that
Marie had, but at the start of the great journey, married young Henri
Baptiste.

Marie was all for a home and some black-eyed babies, but she clung to
Maren as she had ever done,--and now, in her twenty-sixth year, Maren
had risen to the call as her father had done before her, and lifted her
face, rapt as some pagan Priestess', toward that mystic West,--bound
for the Land of the Whispering Hills, whence had come that old, vague
rumour, lured alike by love of the unknown and shy, unspoken longing