things without you."

"I reckon you know as much as a priest, now, don't you?"

"Oh, lots more," she said, gravely. "You see, I am a woman."

He nodded reflectively. "So you are! I keep forgetting that."

Their faces were set towards the west, where the low sun hung over a
ragged range of hills topped with everlasting white. The great
valley, dark with an untrodden wilderness of birch and spruce and
alder, lay on this side, sombre and changeless, like a great, dark-
green mat too large for its resting-place, its edges turned up
towards the line of unmelting snow. Beyond were other ranges thrust
skyward in a magnificent confusion, while still to the farther side
lay the purple valley of the Koyukuk, a valley that called
insistently to restless men, welcoming them in the spring, and
sending them back in the late summer tired and haggard with the
hunger of the North. Each year a tithe remained behind, the toll of
the trackless places, but the rest went back again and again, and
took new brothers with them.

"Did you like the books I sent you with Poleon when he went down to
the coast? I borrowed them from Shakespeare George."

The girl laughed. "Of course I did--that is, all but one of them."

"Which one?"

"I think it was called The Age of Reason, or something like that. I