“You can not go!”

“Why?”

“Because—­” He caught the frightened flutter of her voice again.  “Because they will kill you!”

The low laugh that he breathed in her hair was more of joy than fear.

“I am glad that you care,” he whispered to her softly.

“You must go!” she still persisted.

“With you, yes,” he answered.

“No, no—­to-morrow.  You must go back to Le Pas—­back into the South.  Will you promise me that?”

“Perhaps,” he said.  “I will tell you soon.”  She surrendered to the determination in his voice and allowed him to pass out into the night with her.  Swiftly she led him along a path that ran into the deep gloom of the balsam and spruce.  He could hear the throbbing of her heart and her quick, excited breathing as she stopped, one of her hands clasping him nervously by the arm.

“It is not very far—­from here,” she whispered “You must not go with me.  If they saw me with you—­at this hour—­” He felt her shuddering against him.

“Only a little farther,” he begged.

She surrendered again, hesitatingly, and they went on, more slowly than before, until they came to where a few faint lights in the camp were visible ahead of them.

“Now—­now you must go!”

Howland turned as if to obey.  In an instant the girl was at his side.

“You have not promised,” she entreated.  “Will you go—­to-morrow?”

In the luster of the eyes that were turned up to him in the gloom Howland saw again the strange, sweet power that had taken possession of his soul.  It did not occur to him in these moments that he had known this girl for only a few hours, that until to-night he had heard no word pass from her lips.  He was conscious only that in the space of those few hours something had come into his life which he had never known before; and a deep longing to tell her this, to take her sweet face between his hands, as they stood in the gloom of the forest, and to confess to her that she had become more to him than a passing vision in a strange wilderness filled him.  That night he had forgotten half of the strenuous lesson he had striven years to master; success, ambition, the mere joy of achievement, were for the first time sunk under a greater thing for him—­the pulsating, human presence of this girl; and as he looked down into her face, pleading with him still in its white, silent terror, he forgot, too, what this woman was or might have been, knowing only that to him she had opened a new and glorious world filled with a promise that stirred his blood like sharp wine.  He crushed her hands once more to his breast as he had done on the Great North Trail, holding her so close that he could feel the throbbing of her bosom against him.  He spoke no word—­and still her eyes pleaded with him to go.  Suddenly he freed one of his hands and brushed back the thick hair from her brow and turned her face gently, until what dim light came down from the stars above glowed in the beauty of her eyes.  In his own face she saw that which he had not dared to speak, and from her lips there came a soft little sobbing cry.