afford to make many more mistakes like that—not with another mouth to fill. Why should he care who or what she was! The Gallatins had never been of a curious disposition and he wondered that he should care anything about the identity of this chance female thrown upon his protection. She was not in any way unusual. He was quite sure that any morning in New York he would have passed a hundred like her on the street without a second glance. She had come with the falling evening, wrapped in mystery and had shaken his rather somber philosophy out of its bearings. Night had not diminished the illusion; and once, when the spell of the woods had held them for a moment in its thrall, he had been on the point of taking her in his arms. Did she know how near she had been to that jeopardy? He fancied so. That was why things were different to-day. It was the sanity of nine o’clock in the morning, when there was no firelight to throw shadows among the trees and the voyageurs no longer sang among the rapids. In an unguarded moment she had shown him a shadowed corner of her spirit and was now resenting it. A woman’s chief business in life, he realized, was the hiding of her own frailties, the sources of impulse and the repression of unusual emotions. She had violated these canons of her sex and justly feared that he might misinterpret her. What could she know of him, what expect—of a casual stranger into whose arms her helpless plight had literally[41] thrown her? He was forced to admit, at the last, that to a modest woman the situation was trying.

[41]

He fished moodily, impatiently and unsuccessfully, losing another fish in the pool above. Things were getting serious. His mind now intent, he cast again farther up, dropping the fly skillfully just above a tiny rapid. There he was rewarded; for a fish struck viciously, not so large a one as the first, but large enough for one meal for his companion at least. His spirits rose. He was at peace again with the world, in the elysium of the true fisher who has landed the first fish of the day.

A moment ago he had thought her commonplace. He admitted now that he had been mistaken. A moment ago he had been trying to localize her by the token of some treacherous trick of speech or intonation and had almost been ready to assign her to that limbo of all superior indigenous New Yorkers—“the West”; now he was even willing to admit that she was to all intents and purposes a cosmopolitan. The sanity of nine o’clock in the morning had done away with all myth and moonshine, but daylight had, it seemed, taken nothing from her elfin comeliness. Her hair had at last decided to be brown, her 

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