feelings. Her presence had piqued his interest from the first. When
we can measure a character, we can forfend against surprises--discount
virtues, exaggerate faults, strike a balance to our own ego; but when
what you know is only a faint margin of what you don't know, a siren of
the unknown beckons and lures and retreats.

She had all of what he used to regard as culture in the old Eastern
life, the jargon of the colleges, the smattering of things talked
about, the tricks and turns of trained motions and emotions; but there
was a difference. There was no pretence. There was none of the
fire-proof self-complacency--Self-sufficiency, she had, but not
self-righteousness. Then, most striking contra-distinction of all to
the old-land culture, there was unconsciousness of self--face to
sunlight, radiant of the joy of life, not anaemic and putrid of its own
egoism. She didn't talk in phrases thread-bare from use. She had all
the naked unashamed directness of the West that thinks in terms of life
and speaks without gloze. She never side-stepped the facts of life
that she might not wish to know. Yet her intrusion on such facts gave
the impression of the touch that heals.

The Forest Ranger had heard the Valley talk of MacDonald, the Canadian
sheep rancher, belonging to some famous fur-trade clans that had
intermarried with the Indians generations before; and Wayland used to
wonder if it could be that strain of life from the outdoors that never
pretends nor lies that had given her Eastern culture the red-blooded
directness of the West. To be sure, such a character study was not
less interesting because he read it through eyes glossy as an Indian's,
under lashes with the curve of the Celt, with black hair that blew
changing curls to every wind. Indian and Celt--was that it, he
wondered?--reserve and passion, self-control and yet the abandonment of