beauty. The forest was a sort of advance-post of that land of beauty.

Yet there was beauty too on this prairie, though there was nothing to the
east but snow and the forest so far as eye could see. Nobility and peace
and power brooded over the white world.

As the girl looked, it seemed as though the bosom of the land rose and
fell. She had felt this vibrating life beat beneath the frozen surface.
Now, as she gazed, she smiled sadly to herself, with drooping eyelids
looking out from beneath strong brows.

"I know you--I know you," she said aloud. "You've got to take your toll.
And when you're lying asleep like that, or pretending to, you reach up-
and kill. And yet you can be kind-ah, but you can be kind and beautiful!
But you must have your toll one way or t'other." She sighed and paused;
then, after a moment, looking along the trail--"I don't expect they'll
come to-night, and mebbe not to-morrow, if--if they stay for THAT."

Her eyes closed, she shivered a little. Her lips drew tight, and her
face seemed suddenly to get thinner. "But dad wouldn't--no, he couldn't,
not considerin'--" Again she shut her eyes in pain.

Her face was now turned from the western road by which she had expected
her travellers, and towards the east, where already the snow was taking
on a faint bluish tint, a reflection of the sky deepening nightwards in
that half-circle of the horizon. Distant and a little bleak and
cheerless the half-circle was looking now.

"No one--not for two weeks," she said, in comment on the eastern trail,
which was so little frequented in winter, and this year had been less