ggest that he was in love with
Naida, he would merely have laughed, serenely confident that nothing
more than gentlemanly interest swayed his conduct. It was true, he
greatly admired the girl, recalled to memory her every movement, her
slightest glance, her most insignificant word, while her marvellous
eyes constantly haunted him, yet the dawn of love was not even faintly
acknowledged.

Nevertheless, he manifested an unreasonable dislike for Hampton. He
had never before felt thus toward this person; indeed, he had possessed
a strong man's natural admiration for the other's physical power and
cool, determined courage. He now sincerely feared Hampton's power over
the innocent mind of the girl, imagining his influence to be much
stronger than it really was, and he sought after some suitable means
for overcoming it. He had no faith in this man's professed reform, no
abiding confidence in his word of honor; and it seemed to him then that
the entire future of the young woman's life rested upon his deliverance
of her from the toils of the gambler. He alone, among those who might
be considered as her true friends, knew the secret of her infatuation,
and upon him alone, therefore, rested the burden of her release. It
was his heart that drove him into such a decision, although he
conceived it then to be the reasoning of the brain.

And so she was Naida Gillis, poor old Gillis's little girl! He stopped
suddenly in the road, striving to realize the thought. He had never
once dreamed of such a consummation, and it staggered him. His thought
drifted back to that pale-faced, red-haired, poorly dressed slip of a
girl whom he had occasionally viewed with disapproval about the
post-trader's store at Bethune, and it seemed simply an impossibility.
He recalled the unconscious, dust-covered, nameless waif he had once
held on his lap beside the Bear Water. What was there in common
between that outcast, and this well-groomed, frankly spoken young
woman? Yet, whoever she was or had been, the remembrance of her could
not be conjured out of his brain. He might look back with repugnance
upon those others, those misty phantoms of the past, but the vision of
his mind, his ever-changeable divinity of the vine shadows, would not
become obscured, nor grow less fascinating. Let her be whom she might,
no other could ever win that place she occupied in his heart. His mind
dwelt upon her flushed cheeks, her earnest face, her wealth of gloss