laws."

"Then you will do all this for me--even to the end--when you must
sacrifice all of that for which you have struggled, and which you have
saved?"

"Yes."

"If that is so, then I trust you with my life and my honour. It is all
in your keeping--all."

Her voice broke in a sob. She snatched her hands from him, and with
that sob still quivering on her lips she turned and ran swiftly to the
little tent. She did not look back as she disappeared into it, and
Philip turned like one in a dream and went to the summit of the bare
rock ridge, from which he could look over the quiet surface of the lake
and a hundred square miles of the unpeopled world which had now become
so strangely his own. An hour--a little more than that--had changed the
course of his life as completely as the master-strokes of a painter
might have changed the tones of a canvas epic. It did not take reason
or thought to impinge this fact upon him. It was a knowledge that
engulfed him overwhelmingly. So short a time ago that even now he could
not quite comprehend it all, he was alone out on the lake, thinking of
the story of the First Woman that Jasper had told him down at Fond du
Lac. Since then he had passed through a lifetime. What had happened
might well have covered the space of months--or of years. He had met a
woman, and like the warm sunshine she had become instantly a part of
his soul, flooding him with those emotions which make life beautiful.
That he had told her of this love as calmly as if she had known of it
slumbering within his breast for years seemed to him to be neither
unreal nor remarkable.

He turned his face back to the tent, but there was no movement there.
He knew that there--alone--the girl was recovering from the tremendous
strain under which she had been fighting. He sat down, facing the lake.
For the first time his mental faculties began to adjust themselves and
his blood to flow less heatedly through his veins. For the first time,
too, the magnitude of his promise--of what he had undertaken--began to
impress itself upon him. He had thought that in asking him to fight for
her she had spoken with the physical definition of that word in mind.
But at the outset she had plunged him into mystery. If she had asked
him to draw the automatic at his side and leap into battle with a dozen
of his kind he would not have been surprised. He had expected something
like that. But this other--her first demand upon him! What could it
mean