s wise when he glanced at his companion. She sat
still, looking about her dreamily, very dainty--almost ethereal, he
thought--in that silvery light, and it was so long since he had talked
confidentially to a woman of her kind, attired as became her station.
Laura Waynefleet's hands, as he remembered, were hard and sometimes
red, and the stamp of care was plain on her; but it was very different
with Violet Hamilton. She was wholly a product of luxury and
refinement, and the mere artistic beauty of her attire, which seemed a
part of her, appealed to his imagination.

He did not remember how she set him talking, but he told her
whimsical, and now and then grim, stories of his life in the shadowy
Bush, and she listened with quick comprehension. She seemed to endow
him with that quality, too, since, as he talked, he began to realize,
as he had never quite comprehended before, the something that lay
behind the tense struggle of man with Nature and all the strenuous
endeavour. Perhaps he expressed it in a degree, for now and then the
girl's eyes kindled as he told of some heroic grapple with giant rock
and roaring river, gnawing hunger, and loneliness, and the beaten
man's despair. He found her attention gratifying. It was certainly
pleasant, though he had not consciously adopted the pose, to figure in
the eyes of such a girl as one who had known most of the hardships
that man can bear and played his part in the great epic struggle for
the subjugation of the wilderness. As it happened, she did not know
that those who bear the brunt of that grim strife are for the most
part dumb. Their share is confined to swinging the axe and gripping
the jarring drill.

It was an hour after they left the Inlet when the land breeze came
down a little fresher, and swinging the canoe round, he drove it back
over a glittering sea that commenced to splash about the polished side
of the light craft. Then both of them ceased talking until, as they
approached the shadowy rift in the rock, the girl looked back with a
laugh.

"It is almost a pity to leave all that behind," she said softly.

Nasmyth nodded as he glanced up at the lighted windows of the house.
"In one sense it is. Still, it's rather curious that I think I never
appreciated it quite so much before." He let his paddle trail as he
wondered whether he had gone too far. "I suppose you are going up the
coast with Mrs. Acton in the steamer?" he inquired.

"Yes," answered Violet Hamilton,