deed not simple, which you do not know and cannot come to
understand. You do not know what it is to long for the fleshpots afar,
you cannot understand what it is to yearn for a fair woman's face. And
the woman is fair, Thom, the woman is nobly fair. You have been woman
to this man, and you have been your all, but your all is very little,
very simple. Too little and too simple, and he is an alien man. Him
you have never known, you can never know. It is so ordained. You held
him in your arms, but you never held his heart, this man with his
blurring seasons and his dreams of a barbaric end. Dreams and
dream-dust, that is what he has been to you. You clutched at form and
gripped shadow, gave yourself to a man and bedded with the wraith of
a man. In such manner, of old, did the daughters of men whom the gods
found fair. And, Thom, Thom, I should not like to be John Fairfax in
the night-watches of the years to come, in the night-watches, when his
eyes shall see, not the sun-gloried hair of the woman by his side, but
the dark tresses of a mate forsaken in the forests of the North."

Though she did not understand, she had listened with intense
attention, as though life hung on his speech. But she caught at her
husband's name and cried out in Eskimo:--

"Yes! Yes! Fairfax! My man!"

"Poor little fool, how could he be your man?"

But she could not understand his English tongue, and deemed that she
was being trifled with. The dumb, insensate anger of the Mate-Woman
flamed in her face, and it almost seemed to the man as though she
crouched panther-like for the spring.

He cursed softly to himself and watched the fire fade from her face
and the soft luminous glow of the appealing woman spring up, of the
appealing woman who foregoes strength and panoplies herself wisely in
her weakness.

"He is my man," she said gently. "Never have I known other. It cannot
be that I should ever know other. Nor can it be that he should go from
me."

"Who has said he shall go from thee?" he demanded sharply, half in
exasperation, half in impotence.

"It is for thee to say he shall not go from me," she answered softly,
a half-sob in her throat.

Van Brunt kicked the embers of the fire savagely and sat down.

"It is for thee to say. He is my man. Before all women he is my man.
Thou art big, thou art strong, and behold, I am very weak. See, I am
at thy feet. It is for thee to deal with me. It is for thee."

"Get up!" He jerked her roughly er