saloons, forgot all the
evil there might be in her, and bowed before that supreme power that
human beauty has over us; he worshipped her as he had never worshipped
his God. For a few seconds it was enough for him to gaze on her, then
came an overwhelming impulse to stoop and kiss the soft youthful lips,
to touch them even if ever so lightly. If he could without awakening
her! But no, she was his guest, under his roof and protection. All that
was best in his nature rose and held him motionless like a hand of
iron. After a few seconds Katrine stirred, and Stephen, feeling she was
about to awake, would have moved away, but his eyes seemed fixed and as
impossible to remove from her face as one's hands are from an electric
battery. The next minute her lids were lifted, and her eyes, two wells
of living light, flashed up at him.

"Good-morning," she said, sitting up. "How dreadfully pale you look,
Stephen! What is the matter?"

"Do I?" he answered, with a forced laugh, feeling the blood, which had
seemed to rest suspended in his veins for those few seconds, rush to his
heart again in great waves.

"You do indeed," she said, getting up. "I expect you want your
breakfast. Tell me what I can do to make myself useful."

She shook her hair straight, fastened the collar of her bodice, and, was
dressed. She needed no toilet apparently, but looked as clean and fresh
as a rose waking up in its garden.

"Nothing," returned Stephen hastily. "Go over and tell Talbot to come in
to breakfast, if you like; I'll have it ready when you come back."

Katrine looked round regretfully, as if she would have liked to stay and
help him; then concluding she had better do as she was told, she took up
her fur cap and went out.

The west gulch looks magnificent in the first early light, with all
degrees of shadows, some black, some dusky, some the clearest grey,
lingering in its snowy recesses, and the first glimpse of gold falling
down it from the east. Katrine stopped and gazed up at the impressive
beauty above and around her: trees in the gulch, now covered with a
thick snowy mantle, stood assuming all sorts of grotesque forms, and
extending their arms as if calling the spectator to their cold embrace.
It was beautiful, but to Katrine it seemed so silent, so overawing, and
so death-like, that she shivered as she looked up and down from the
flat plateau where she stood, and hurried on the few necessary yards to
Talbot's cabin.

When they ca