She caught her breath. A low sob broke from her lips.

"You don't know-- what you will do--"

Billy's voice sounded strange even to himself. He rose to his feet and
looked down into her upturned face, his hands clenched, his body
trembling with the fight he was making. Words came to his lips and
were forced back again-- words which almost won in their struggle to
tell her again that she had come to him from out of the Barren like an
angel, that within the short space since their meeting he had lived a
lifetime, and that he loved her as no man had ever loved a woman
before. Her blue eyes looked at him questioningly as he stood above
her.

And then he saw the thing which for a moment he had forgotten-- the
long, rough box at the woman's back. His fingers dug deeper into his
palms, and with a gasping breath he turned away. A hundred paces back
in the spruce he had found a bare rock with a red bakneesh vine
growing over it. With his knife he cut off an armful, and when he
returned with it into the light of the fire the bakneesh glowed like a
mass of crimson flowers. The woman had risen to her feet, and looked
at him speechlessly as he scattered the vine over the box. He turned
to her and said, softly:

"In honor of the dead!"

The color had faded from her face, but her eyes shone like stars.
Billy advanced toward her with his hands reaching out. But suddenly he
stopped and stood listening. After a moment he turned and asked again: