t the rail did not turn, nor for a moment
did she answer. He could see her profile clear-cut as a cameo in the
almost vivid light, and in that light her eyes were wide and filled
with a dusky fire, and her lips were parted a little, and her slim body
was tense as she looked at the wonder of the moon silhouetting the
cragged castles of the peaks, up where the soft, gray clouds lay like
shimmering draperies.

Then she turned her face a little and nodded. "Yes, Alaska," she said,
and the old captain fancied there was the slightest ripple of a tremor
in her voice. "Your Alaska, Captain Rifle."

Out of the clearness of the night came to them a distant sound like the
low moan of thunder. Twice before, Mary Standish had heard it, and now
she asked: "What was that? Surely it can not be a storm, with the moon
like that, and the stars so clear above!"

"It is ice breaking from the glaciers and falling into the sea. We are
in the Wrangel Narrows, and very near the shore, Miss Standish. If it
were day you could hear the birds singing. This is what we call the
Inside Passage. I have always called it the water-wonderland of the
world, and yet, if you will observe, I must be mistaken--for we are
almost alone on this side of the ship. Is it not proof? If I were right,
the men and women in there--dancing, playing cards, chattering--would be
crowding this rail. Can you imagine humans like that? But they can't see
what I see, for I am a ridiculous old fool who remembers things. Ah, do
you catch that in the air, Miss Standish--the perfume of flowers, of
forests, of green things ashore? It is faint, but I catch it."

"And so do I."

She breathed in deeply of the sweet air, and turned then, so that she
stood with her back to the rail, facing the flaming lights of the ship.

The mellow cadence of the music came to her, soft-stringed and sleepy;
she could hear the shuffle of dancing feet. Laughter rippled with the
rhythmic thrum of the ship, voices rose and fell beyond the lighted
windows, and as the old captain looked at her, there was something in
her face which he could not understand.

She had come aboard strangely at Seattle, alone and almost at the last
minute--defying the necessity of making reservation where half a
thousand others had been turned away--and chance had brought her under
his eyes. In desperation she had appealed to him, and he had discovered
a strange terror under the forced calm of her appearance. Since then he
h