ccidental had no allurements for him. She
rested, changed position, stretched her limbs, took a long circle or
two, skimming the hillside when she needed the reaction. But always she
came swinging back again to stand and watch her lover with a
half-smiling, half-tender gaze that tried his sangfroid terribly when he
strove to catch it and record it in the calm and scientific technique
which might excite anybody except the workman.

"Am I pretty, Duane?"

"Annoyingly divine. I'm trying not to think of it, dear, until my hand
and heart may wobble with impunity. Are you cold?"

"No.... Do you think you'll make a full-fledged picture from this
motive?"

"How did you guess?"

"I don't know. I've a premonition that your reputation is going to soar
up like a blazing star from this waste of snow around us.... I wish--I
wish that it might be from me, through me--my humble aid--that your
glory breaks out----"

"If it ever does, it will do it through you. I told you that long ago."

"Yes."

"I've known it a long, long time, Geraldine. Without you there's nothing
to me except surface. You are the depths of me."

"And you of me, Duane." Sweet eyes remote, she stood looking into space;
at peace with her soul, dreaming, content. And it was then that he
caught and imprisoned in colour the nameless beauty which was the
foundation for his first famous picture, whose snowy splendour silenced
all except those little critics who chirp automatically, eternally, on
the ruddy hearthstone of the gods.

* * * * *

From the distant hill-top a voice bellowed at them through a megaphone;
and, looking aloft, they beheld Scott gesticulating.

"If you two mental irresponsibles want any breakfast," he shouted,
"you'd better hustle! Miller telephones that the big boar fed below
Cloudy Mountain at sunrise!"

Geraldine looked at her lover, cheeks pink with excitement. He was
immensely interested, too, and as soon as he could fold his easel, lock
up brushes and palette, protect his canvas with a fresh one faced with
cork buffers, they started for the house, discussing the chances for a
shot that afternoon.

Like the most desirable and wary of most species of game, furry or
finny, the huge, heavily tusked veterans of the wild-boar family often
feed after dark, being too cunning to banquet by daylight and carouse
with the gayer blades and the big, fierce sows of the neighbourhood.

Sometimes in the white gloo