panting, sniffing inquiry of a bear close at hand, and Philip
reached forward for his rifle. For an instant Josephine's hand
fluttered to his own, and held it back, and the dark glow of her
eyes said: "Don't kill." Here there were no big-eyed moose-birds,
none of the mellow throat sounds of the brush sparrow, no harsh
janglings of the gaudily coloured jays. In the timber fell the
soft footpads of creatures with claw and fang, marauders and
outlaws of darkness. Light, sunshine, everything that loved the
openness of day were beyond. For more than an hour they had driven
their canoes steadily on, when, as suddenly as they had entered
it, they slipped out from the cavernous gloom into the sunlight
again.

Josephine drew a deep breath as the sunlight flooded her face and
hair.

"I have my own name for that place," she said. "I call it the
Valley of Silent Things. It is a great swamp, and they say that
the moss grows in it so deep that caribou and deer walk over it
without breaking through."

The stream was swelling out into a narrow, finger-like lake that
stretched for a mile or more ahead of them, and she turned to nod
her head at the spruce and cedar shores with their colourings of
red and gold, where birch, and poplar, and ash splashed vividly
against the darker background.

"From now on it is all like that." she said. "Lake after lake,
most of them as narrow as this, clear to the doors of Adare House.
It is a wonderful lake country, and one may easily lose one's