uncertain of purpose as quicksilver.

In those tragic days of readjustment came Peter Hamilton, as strange to
the bald conditions of frontier life as the girl herself. From the
beginning there had been between them the barrier of circumstance.
Hamilton was poor, Judith the mainstay of a household whose thriftlessness
had become a proverb. He came of a family that numbered a signer of the
Declaration of Independence, a famous chief-justice, and the dean of a
great university; Judith was uncertain of her right to the very name she
bore. And yet they were young, he a man, she a woman—eternal fountain of
interest. A precocious sense of the fitness of things was the compass that
enabled Peter to steer through the deep waters in the years that followed.
But the girl paid the penalty of her great heart; in that troublous sea of
friendship, she was soon adrift without rudder, sail, or compass.

Judith was now eight-and-twenty, and a sculptor would have found a hundred
statues in her. Long of limb, deep-bosomed, youth and health radiated from
her as sparks fly upward. In sunlight, her black hair had the bluish
iridescence of a ripe plum. The eyes were deep and questioning—the eyes of
a young seraph whose wings had not yet brushed the far distant heights of
paradise. Again, in her pagan gladness of living, she might have been a
Valkyr come down from Valhalla on a shooting-star. And yet, in this
wilderness that was famishing for woman’s love and tears and laughter, by
a very perversity of fate she walked alone.

She was a true daughter of the desert, the child of stark, unlovely
circumstance. No well-bred romance of book and bells and churchly
benediction had ushered her into being. Her maternal grandfather had been
the famous Sioux chief, Flying Hawk; her grandmother, a white woman, who
knew no word of her people’s tongue, nor yet her name or race. The Indians