d saw me.

Whoever she was she had good nerves, for she never even stared as women
do at a strange man. I could have been no reassuring vision either,
standing there in moccasined feet that had come in on her as silently as
a wolf or an Indian; with dirty, frozen clothes; and a face that the
Lord knows is dark and hard at its best, and must have been forbidding
enough that night between dirt and fatigue. But that girl only glanced
at me as quietly as if she had known I was there.

"Did you----Were you looking for any one?" she asked. And the second I
heard her voice I knew she guessed she had spoken to me a quarter of an
hour ago in words she would probably have given all she possessed to
prevent a stranger from knowing she had need to speak to any one.

Only that was not the reason I half stammered, "Not exactly." It was
because I could see her eyes,--and they were like sapphires, and the
sea, and the night sky with the first stars in it. I snatched off my cap
that I had forgotten, and bits of melting ice fell off it and tinkled
on the floor. The sharp little sound brought my wits back to me. Perhaps
I had never really thought my dream girl would come true, but once I had
found her I never meant to lose her. And I knew, if I cared a straw for
my life and the love that was to be in it, that I must meet her now _for
the first time_; that nothing, not even if she told me so herself, must
make me admit she had come to me at the lake by mistake, or that I had
ever heard her voice before.

I said, easily enough, "I'm afraid I startled you. I'm Stretton,
Wilbraham's partner"--which I was to the extent of a thousand
dollars--"I've just come home."

And crazy as it sounds, I felt as if I had come home, for the first time
in my life. For the girl of my dreams came to her feet with just that
lovely, controlled ease you see in Pavlova, and with the prettiest
little gesture of welcome.

"Oh, you're frozen stiff," she said with a kind of dismayed sympathy.
"And I heard Mr. Wilbraham say some one had forgotten to send out your
horse for you, and that you'd probably walk--the whole way from
Caraquet! You must be tired to death. Please come to the fire and get
warm--now you've come home!"

I thought of the queer smell that clung to my stained old coat and the
company I had kept at Skunk's Misery--though if I had guessed what that
wretched boy was going to mean to me I might have grudged my contact
with him less--and I would not