at she was--what she had been since
a child, noticeable and besought, sometimes beloved. It was too strong a
nature to compel love often, but it never failed to compel admiration. Not
greatly a creature of words, she had become moody of late; and even now,
alive with light and feeling and animal life, she suddenly stopped her
romp and run, and called the dog to her.

"Heel, Shako!" she said, and made for the door of the little house, which
looked so snug and homelike. She paused before she came to the door, to
watch the smoke curling up from the chimney straight as a column, for
there was not a breath of air stirring. The sun was almost gone, and the
strong bluish light was settling on everything, giving even the green
spruce-trees a curious burnished tone.

_Swish! Thud!_ She faced the woods quickly. It was only a sound that she
had heard how many hundreds of times! It was the snow slipping from some
broad branch of the fir-trees to the ground. Yet she started now.
Something was on her mind, agitating her senses, affecting her
self-control.

"I'll be jumping out of my boots when the fire snaps, or the frost cracks
the ice, next," she said, aloud, contemptuously. "I dunno what's the
matter with me. I feel as if some one was hiding somewhere ready to pop
out on me. I haven't never felt like that before."

She had formed the habit of talking to herself, for it had seemed at
first, as she was left alone when her father went trapping or upon
journeys for the Government, that by-and-by she would start at the sound
of her own voice if she didn't think aloud. So she was given to soliloquy,
defying the old belief that people who talked to themselves were going
mad. She laughed at that. She said that birds sang to themselves and
didn't go mad, and crickets chirruped, and frogs croaked, and owls hooted,
and she would talk and not go crazy either. So she talked to herself and
to Shako when she was alone.

How quiet it was inside when her light supper was eaten--bread and beans
and pea-soup; she had got this from her French mother. Now she sat, her
elbows on her knees, her chin on her hands, looking into the fire. Shako
was at her feet upon the great musk-ox rug, which her father had got on
one of his hunting trips in the Athabasca country years ago. It belonged
as she belonged. It breathed of the life of the north-land, for the
timbers of the hut were hewn cedar; the rough chimney, the seats, and the
shelves on which a few bo