r the fire
we had built among the stones was to understand that her heart was in
the business for the moment and that she was happy even with the detail.

Mrs. Maloney at home, knitting in the sun and believing that the world
was made in six days, was one woman; but Mrs. Maloney, standing with
bare arms over the smoke of a wood fire under the pine trees, was
another; and Peter Sangree, the Canadian pupil, with his pale skin, and
his loose, though not ungainly figure, stood beside her in very
unfavourable contrast as he scraped potatoes and sliced bacon with
slender white fingers that seemed better suited to hold a pen than a
knife. She ordered him about like a slave, and he obeyed, too, with
willing pleasure, for in spite of his general appearance of debility he
was as happy to be in camp as any of them.

But more than any other member of the party, Joan Maloney, the daughter,
was the one who seemed a natural and genuine part of the landscape, who
belonged to it all just in the same way that the trees and the moss and
the grey rocks running out into the water belonged to it. For she was
obviously in her right and natural setting, a creature of the wilds, a
gipsy in her own home.

To any one with a discerning eye this would have been more or less
apparent, but to me, who had known her during all the twenty-two years
of her life and was familiar with the ins and outs of her primitive,
utterly un-modern type, it was strikingly clear. To see her there made
it impossible to imagine her again in civilisation. I lost all
recollection of how she looked in a town. The memory somehow evaporated.
This slim creature before me, flitting to and fro with the grace of the
woodland life, swift, supple, adroit, on her knees blowing the fire, or
stirring the frying-pan through a veil of smoke, suddenly seemed the
only way I had ever really seen her. Here she was at home; in London she
became some one concealed by clothes, an artificial doll overdressed and
moving by clockwork, only a portion of her alive. Here she was alive all
over.

I forget altogether how she was dressed, just as I forget how any
particular tree was dressed, or how the markings ran on any one of the
boulders that lay about the Camp. She looked just as wild and natural
and untamed as everything else that went to make up the scene, and more
than that I cannot say.

Pretty, she was decidedly not. She was thin, skinny, dark-haired, and
possessed of great physical str