ll be out of work. Dear, dear, how we begin to crowd
the days!"

For a whole week he worked at intervals, building his chimney with
stones from the river bed, and laying them well and truly. Ruth helped
him at whiles, when household duties did not claim her. Now and then,
when his back ached with the toil, he would break off for a spell and
watch her as she stooped over the cooking-pot, or knelt by the
stream-side, bare-legged, with petticoat kilted high, beating the linen
on a flat stone.

When the chimney was finished they were in great anxiety lest, being
built close under the cliff, it should catch a down-draught of the wind
and fill the dwelling with smoke. But the wind came, and, as it turned
out, made a leap from the cliff to the valley, singing high overhead and
missing the chimney clear. When they lit their first fire indoors and
ran forth to see the smoke rising in a thin blue pillar against the
pines, they laughed elated, and at supper drank to their handiwork.

Ruth's first sacrifice on the new hearth was the solemn heating of a
flat iron, to crimp and pleat her lover's body-linen.

Next day he shot a deer and flayed it; and, the next, set to work to
build a bed. Their couch had been of white linen laid upon skins, the
skins resting on a thick mat of leaves. Now he raised it from the
ground on four posts, joining the posts with a stout framework and
lacing the framework with cords criss-crossed like the netting of a
hammock. Also he replaced the curtain at the entrance with a door of
split pinewood, and fashioned a wooden bolt.

The halcyon weather held for two weeks, the delicate weather of Indian
summer. Day by day the forest dropped its leaves under a blue windless
sky; but the nights sharpened their frosts. Ruth, stealing early to her
bathing-pool, found it edged with thin ice, and paused, breaking it with
taps of her naked foot while she braced her body for the cold shock.

The flat rock over the fall was still their supper-table. After supping
they would wrap themselves closer in their cloaks of bearskin, and sit
for long, his arm about her body. The stars wheeled overhead.
At a little distance shone the open window inviting them.
From their ledge they overlooked the world.

She marvelled at the zest he threw into every moment and detail of this
strange honeymooning. He had taken pride even in skinning and cutting
up the slain deer.

She had, in fact, being fearful of her expe