licate of tulles, fluorescent and bewildering,
was daintily and airily shaken in the face of the astonished night.

Without warning the span was sundered by an arrogant arm of black. The
arch dissolved in blushing confusion. Chasms of blackness yawned,
grew, and rushed together. Broken masses of strayed color and fading
fire stole timidly towards the sky-line. Then the dome of night
towered imponderable, immense, and the stars came back one by one, and
the wolf-dogs mourned anew.

"I can offer you so little, dear," the man said with a slightly
perceptible bitterness. "The precarious fortunes of a gypsy wanderer."

And the woman, placing his hand and pressing it against her heart,
said, as a great woman had said before her, "A tent and a crust of
bread with you, Richard."

CHAPTER XIX

How-ha was only an Indian woman, bred of a long line of fish-eating,
meat-rending carnivores, and her ethics were as crude and simple as
her blood. But long contact with the whites had given her an insight
into their way of looking at things, and though she grunted
contemptuously in her secret soul, she none the less understood their
way perfectly. Ten years previous she had cooked for Jacob Welse,
and served him in one fashion or another ever since; and when on a
dreary January morning she opened the front door in response to the
deep-tongued knocker, even her stolid presence was shaken as she
recognized the visitor. Not that the average man or woman would have
so recognized. But How-ha's faculties of observing and remembering
details had been developed in a hard school where death dealt his
blow to the lax and life saluted the vigilant.

How-ha looked up and down the woman who stood before her. Through
the heavy veil she could barely distinguish the flash of the eyes,
while the hood of the _parka_ effectually concealed the hair, and the
_parka_ proper the particular outlines of the body. But How-ha
paused and looked again. There was something familiar in the vague
general outline. She quested back to the shrouded head again, and
knew the unmistakable poise. Then How-ha's eyes went blear as she
traversed the simple windings of her own brain, inspecting the bare
shelves taciturnly stored with the impressions of a meagre life. No
disorder; no confused mingling of records; no devious and
interminable impress of complex emotions, tangled theories, and
bewildering abstractions--nothing but simple facts, neatly class