Indian strain somewhere, be assured, Avery Van Brunt.  And, Avery Van Brunt, don’t be nervous, she won’t eat you; she’s only a woman, and not a bad-looking one at that.  Oriental rather than aborigine.  Eyes large and fairly wide apart, with just the faintest hint of Mongol obliquity.  Thom, you’re an anomaly.  You’re out of place here among these Eskimos, even if your father is one.  Where did your mother come from? or your grandmother?  And Thom, my dear, you’re a beauty, a frigid, frozen little beauty with Alaskan lava in your blood, and please don’t look at me that way.

He laughed and stood up.  Her insistent stare disconcerted him.  A dog was prowling among the grub-sacks.  He would drive it away and place them into safety against Fairfax’s return.  But Thom stretched out a detaining hand and stood up, facing him.

“You?” she said, in the Arctic tongue which differs little from Greenland to Point Barrow.  “You?”

And the swift expression of her face demanded all for which “you” stood, his reason for existence, his presence there, his relation to her husband—­everything.

“Brother,” he answered in the same tongue, with a sweeping gesture to the south.  “Brothers we be, your man and I.”

She shook her head.  “It is not good that you be here.”

“After one sleep I go.”

“And my man?” she demanded, with tremulous eagerness.

Van Brunt shrugged his shoulders.  He was aware of a certain secret shame, of an impersonal sort of shame, and an anger against Fairfax.  And he felt the warm blood in his face as he regarded the young savage.  She was just a woman.  That was all—­a woman.  The whole sordid story over again, over and over again, as old as Eve and young as the last new love-light.

“My man!  My man!  My man!” she was reiterating vehemently, her face passionately dark, and the ruthless tenderness of the Eternal Woman, the Mate-Woman, looking out at him from her eyes.

“Thom,” he said gravely, in English, “you were born in the Northland forest, and you have eaten fish and meat, and fought with frost and famine, and lived simply all the days of your life.  And there are many things, indeed not simple, which you do not know and cannot come to understand.  You do not know what it is to long for the fleshpots afar, you cannot understand what it is to yearn for a fair woman’s face.  And the woman is fair, Thom, the woman is nobly fair.  You have been woman to this man, and you have been your all, but your all is very little, very simple.  Too little and too simple, and he is an alien man.  Him you have never known, you can never know.  It is so ordained.  You held him in your arms, but you never held his heart, this man with his blurring seasons and his dreams of a barbaric end.  Dreams and dream-dust, that is what he has been to you.  You clutched at form and gripped shadow, gave yourself to a man and bedded with the wraith of a man.  In such manner, of old, did the daughters of men whom the gods found fair.  And, Thom, Thom, I should not like to be John Fairfax in the night-watches of the years to come, in the night-watches, when his eyes shall see, not the sun-gloried hair of the woman by his side, but the dark tresses of a mate forsaken in the forests of the North.”