past. Here in the summer, with the steamboats
ploughing through the rocking green water, and the sun streaming down
upon the banks crowded with active human beings, glinting on the gay
signs of the saloons and the white and green painted doors of the
warehouses, with the brilliant azure sky stretched above, and far off
the tall green larches piercing it with their slender tops,--in the
summer this main street is a pleasant, cheerful sight; but now, with the
river solid and silent, the banks black and frozen, and the bleak,
bitter sky above, it looked more desolate than the inner streets of the
town, more uninviting than Good Luck Row, which had little cabins on
each side, and where the inhabitants overlooked their opposite
neighbours' firelit interior instead of the frozen river. The side-walks
of the row were like the other side-walks of the city, a wealth of soft
mud and slush and dirt through the warm weather, and now frozen hard
into uneven lumps, big depressions, and rough hummocks. The cabins were
uniform in size, small, with one fair-sized window in the front, beside
the door, which opened straight into the main room, where the front
window was. At the back there was another smaller room with a tiny
window, looking out over a black barren ice-field, for Good Luck Row was
on the edge of the town.

Katrine lived at No. 13. This cabin had been the last to be occupied on
account of its unlucky number, but Katrine only laughed at it, and
painted it very large in white paint upon the door. Here Katrine lived
alone, though her father, the little stunted Pole who kept the "Pistol
Shot," was one of the richest men in the city.

And because she lived alone some of her neighbours declared she was not
respectable. As a matter of fact, she was more respectable than many of
the married women living in the row, and Katrine knew many a story with
which she could have startled an unsuspecting husband when he came into
town after a week or two's absence prospecting or at work on the claims;
but she did not trouble about other people's affairs; she gave her
friendship to those who sought it, and heeded not at all those who
condemned her.

On an afternoon about three weeks after her first meeting with Stephen,
Katrine stood in front of her little glass in the corner of her cabin,
smoothing her short glossy hair; when this was flattened with
mathematical exactness to her well-shaped head--for Katrine was always
trim and neat in he