colour of her hair, suggested to him that he had trodden on the sacred
ground of a passionate heart.

Poor man! He would have been only too glad just then to have effaced his
foot-prints if he had had the least idea how to do it. The small shawl
she wore fell from her unnoticed as she went quickly into the house. He
picked it up, and folded it awkwardly, but with meditative care. It was
a square of orange-coloured merino, such as pedlars who deal with the
squaws always carry, an ordinary thing for a settler's child to possess.
As he held it, Bates felt compunction that it was not something finer
and to his idea prettier, for he did not like the colour. He decided
that he would purchase something better for her as soon as possible. He
followed her into the house.




CHAPTER III.


Night, black and cold, settled over the house that had that day for the
first time been visited by death. Besides the dead man, there were now
three people to sleep in it: an old woman, whose failing brain had
little of intelligence left, except such as showed itself in the
everyday habits of a long and orderly life; the young girl, whose mind
slow by nature in reaching maturity and retarded by the monotony of her
life, had not yet gained the power of realising its own deeper
thoughts, still less of explaining them to another; and this man, Bates,
who, being by natural constitution peculiarly susceptible to the strain
of the sight of illness and death which he had just undergone, was not