"If that is so, then I trust you with my life and my honour. It is
all in your keeping--all."

Her voice broke in a sob. She snatched her hands from him, and
with that sob still quivering on her lips she turned and ran
swiftly to the little tent. She did not look back as she
disappeared into it, and Philip turned like one in a dream and
went to the summit of the bare rock ridge, from which he could
look over the quiet surface of the lake and a hundred square miles
of the unpeopled world which had now become so strangely his own.
An hour--a little more than that--had changed the course of his
life as completely as the master-strokes of a painter might have
changed the tones of a canvas epic. It did not take reason or
thought to impinge this fact upon him. It was a knowledge that
engulfed him overwhelmingly. So short a time ago that even now he
could not quite comprehend it all, he was alone out on the lake,
thinking of the story of the First Woman that Jasper had told him
down at Fond du Lac. Since then he had passed through a lifetime.
What had happened might well have covered the space of months--or
of years. He had met a woman, and like the warm sunshine she had
become instantly a part of his soul, flooding him with those
emotions which make life beautiful. That he had told her of this
love as calmly as if she had known of it slumbering within his
breast for years seemed to him to be neither unreal nor
remarkable.

He turned his face back to the tent, but there was no movement
there. He knew that there--alone--the girl was recovering from
the tremendous strain under which she had been fighting. He sat
down, facing the lake. For the first time his mental faculties