ened cry-baby I used to be--well,
I've learned to hold my own."

She was extraordinarily affectionate, full of unexpected little ways of
endearment, and clung to me when we parted, making me promise to return
very soon. Yes, she was my girl, devoted to me, attached to me by every
tendril of her being. Every look, every word, every act of her expressed
a bright, fine, radiant love. I was satisfied, yet unsatisfied, and once
again I entreated her.

"Berna, are you sure, quite sure, you're all right in that place among
all that folly and drunkenness and vice? Let me take you away, dear."

"Oh, no," she said very tenderly; "I'm all right. I would tell you at
once, my boy, if I had any fear. That's just what a poor girl has to put
up with all the time; that's what I've had to put up with all my life.
Believe me, boy, I'm wonderfully blind and deaf at times. I don't think
I'm very bad, am I?"

"You're as good as gold."

"For your sake I'll always try to be," she answered.

As we were kissing good-bye she asked timidly:

"What about the rouge, dear? Shall I cease to use it?"

"Poor little girl! Oh no, I don't suppose it matters. I've got very
old-fashioned ideas. Good-bye, darling."

"Good-bye, beloved."

I went away treading on sunshine, trembling with joy, thrilled with love
for her, blessing her anew.

Yet still the rouge stuck in my crop as if it were the symbol of some
insidious decadence.

CHAPTER XV

It was about two months later when I returned from a flying visit to
Dawson.

"Lots of mail for you two," I cried, exultantly bursting into the cabin.

"Mail? Hooray!"

Jim and the Prodigal, who were lying on their bunks, leapt up eagerly.
No one longs for his letters like your Northern exile, and for two whole
months we had not heard from the outside.

"Yes, I got over fifty letters between us three. Drew about a dozen
myself, there's half a dozen for you, Jim, and the balance for you, old
sport."

I handed the Prodigal about two dozen letters.

"Ha! now we'll have the whole evening just to browse on them. My, what a
stack! How was it you had a time getting them?"

"Well, you see, when I got into town the mail had just been sorted, and
there was a string of over three hundred men waiting at the general
delivery wicket. I took my place at the tail-end of the line, and every
newcomer fell in behind me. My! but it was such weary waiting, moving up
step by step; but I'd just about got there w