y, her dark eyes brimming with her fervor. "Perhaps I can't
tell you why--maybe it's just a feeling of need, of insufficiency of
self. Besides, God is close, like He was to the Israelites when they
were in the wilderness; but you will remember that He never came close
again.--This forest is so big and so awful, He knows he must stay close
to keep you from dying of fear.--God may not be a reality to the people
of the cities, where they see only buildings and streets, but Ben, He is
to me. You can't forget Him up here. He stands on every mountain, just
as the sons of Aaron saw Him."

He found, to his surprise, that she was not ill-read, particularly in
the old-time classics. But her environment had also influenced her
choice of reading. She loved the old legends in the minor,--far-off and
plaintive things that reflected the mood of the dusky forest in which
she lived.

One night, when the moon was in the sky, he told her of his war record,
of the shell-shock and the strange, criminal mania that followed it; and
then of his swift recovery. With an over-powering need of
self-justification he told her of his further adventures with Ezram, of
the old man's murder and the theft of the claim. She heard him out,
listening attentively; but in loyalty to her father she did not let
herself believe him entirely. The answer she gave him was the same as
she had always given at his every reference to his side of the case.

"If you were in the right, you'd take me back and let the law take its
course," she told him. "You'd not be out here laying an ambush for them,
to kill them when they try to rescue me."

He could never make her understand how, by the intricacies of law, it
would be a rare chance that he would be able to fasten the crime on the
murderers: that he had taken the only sure way open to make them pay for
Ezram's death. He told her of the old man's, final request; how that his
war with her father and his men was a debt that, by secret, inscrutable
laws of his being, could never be written off or disavowed. But he could
never fully find words to uphold his position. The thing went back to
his instincts, traced at last to the remorseless spirit of the wolf that
was his heritage.

Yet these hours of talk were immensely good for him. While they never
met on common grounds, the girl's true outlook and nobility of character
were ever more manifest to him; and were not without a gentling, healing
influence upon him. He could