CHAPTER II

She came out of the wood of glistening birch, and with the first fires
of the sun blazoning her unbound hair raced lightly across the
dew-dripping meadow. The earth was fat with excessive moisture and
soft to her feet, while the dank vegetation slapped against her knees
and cast off flashing sprays of liquid diamonds. The flush of the
morning was in her cheek, and its fire in her eyes, and she was aglow
with youth and love. For she had nursed at the breast of nature,--in
forfeit of a mother,--and she loved the old trees and the creeping
green things with a passionate love; and the dim murmur of growing life
was a gladness to her ears, and the damp earth-smells were sweet to her
nostrils.

Where the upper-reach of the meadow vanished in a dark and narrow
forest aisle, amid clean-stemmed dandelions and color-bursting
buttercups, she came upon a bunch of great Alaskan violets. Throwing
herself at full length, she buried her face in the fragrant coolness,
and with her hands drew the purple heads in circling splendor about her
own. And she was not ashamed. She had wandered away amid the
complexities and smirch and withering heats of the great world, and she
had returned, simple, and clean, and wholesome. And she was glad of
it, as she lay there, slipping back to the old days, when the universe
began and ended at the sky-line, and when she journeyed over the Pass
to behold the Abyss.

It was a primitive life, that of her childhood, with few conventions,
but such as there were, stern ones. And they might be epitomized, as
she had read somewhere in her later years, as "the faith of food and
blanket." This faith had her father kept, she thought, remembering