h yes," was the girl's reply. "I had forgotten that." The notes of a
bugle, clear and silvery in the still air, floated across the meadow at
that moment, and Gerald Ainley laughed.

"The breakfast bell! We must hurry, Miss Yardely. It will scarcely do
to keep your uncle waiting."

They turned and hurried back to the Post, nothing more being said in
reference to Miskodeed and Hubert Stane. And an hour later, in the
bustle of the departure, the whole matter was brushed aside by Helen
Yardely, though now and again through the day, it recurred to her mind
as a rather unpleasant episode; and she found herself wondering how so
fine a man as Stane could stoop to the folly of which many men in the
North were guilty.

At the end of that day her uncle ordered the camp to be pitched on a
little meadow backed by a sombre forest of spruce. And after the
evening meal, in company with Gerald Ainley, she walked towards the
timber where an owl was hooting dismally. The air was perfectly still,
the sky above crystal clear, and the Northern horizon filled with a
golden glow. As they reached the shadow of the spruce, and seated
themselves on a fallen trunk, a fox barked somewhere in the recess of
the wood, and from afar came the long-drawn melancholy howl of a wolf.
Helen Yardely looked down the long reach of the river and her eyes
fixed themselves on a tall bluff crowned with spruce, distant perhaps a
mile and a half away.

"I like the Wild," she said suddenly, breaking the silence that had
been between them.

"It is all right," laughed Ainley, "when you can journey through it
comfortably as we are doing."

"It must have its attractions even when comfort is not possible," said
the girl musingly, "for the men who live here live as nature meant man
to live."

"On straight moose-meat--sometimes," laughed Ainley. "With bacon and
beans and flour brought in from the outside for luxuries."

"I was not thinking of the food," answered the girl quickly. "I was
thinking of the toil, the hardship--the Homeric labours of those who
face the hazards of the North."

"Yes," agreed the man, "the labours are certainly Homeric, and there
are men who like the life well enough, who have made fortunes here and
have gone back to their kind in Montreal, New York, London, only to
find that civilization has lost its attraction for them."

"I can understand that," was the quick reply. "There is something in
the silence and wildness of vast spaces which