fight for herself and her dead. The dogs slunk in at her feet, and
MacVeigh saw the gleam of their naked fangs in the starlight.

"He died three days ago," she finished, quietly, "and I am taking him
back to my people, down on the Little Seul."

"It is two hundred miles," said MacVeigh, looking at her as if she
were mad. "You will die."

"I have traveled two days," replied the woman. "I am going on."

"Two days-- across the Barren!"

MacVeigh looked at the box, grim and terrible in the ghostly radiance
that fell upon it. Then he looked at the woman. She had bowed her head
upon her breast, and her shining hair fell loose and disheveled. He
saw the pathetic droop of her tired shoulders, and knew that she was
crying. In that moment a thrilling warmth flooded every fiber of his
body, and the glory of this that had come to him from out of the
Barren held him mute. To him woman was all that was glorious and good.
The pitiless loneliness of his life had placed them next to angels in
his code of things, and before him now he saw all that he had ever
dreamed of in the love and loyalty of womanhood and of wifehood.

The bowed little figure before him was facing death for the man she
had loved, and who was dead. In a way he knew that she was mad. And
yet her madness was the madness of a devotion that was beyond fear, of
a faithfulness that made no measure of storm and cold and starvation;
and he was filled with a desire to go up to her as she stood crumpled
and exhausted against the box, to take her close in his arms and tell