her hair seemed to sparkle along its crisp ripples; her little throat filled itself out, round and firm; she walked with a spring and a swing; she sang and whistled, no Mrs. Hudson near to scowl at her.  Dish-washing was not drudgery, cooking was a positive pleasure.  Everything smelt so good.  She was always shutting her eyes to enjoy the smell of things, forgetting to listen in order to taste thoroughly, forgetting to look in the delight of listening to such musical silences, and forgetting even to breathe in the rapture of sight ...  Miss Blake and she put up preserves, and Sheila had to invent jests to find some pretext for her laughter, so ridiculous was the look of that broad square back, its hair short above the man’s flannel collar, and the apron-strings tied pertly above the very wide, slightly worn corduroy breeches and the big boots.  Sheila was always thinking of a certain famous Puss of fairy-tale memory, and biting her tongue to keep it from the epithet.  After Hilliard gave her the black horse and she began to explore the mountain game trails, her life seemed as full of pleasantness as it could hold.  And yet ... with just that gift of Hilliard’s, the overshadowing of her joy began.  No, really before that, with his first visit.

That was in late September when the nights were frosty and Miss Blake had begun to cut and stack her wood for winter, and to use it for a crackling hearth-fire after supper.  They were sitting before such a fire when Hilliard came.

Miss Blake sat man-fashion on the middle of her spine, her legs crossed, a magazine in her hands, and on her blunt nose a pair of large, black-rimmed spectacles.  Her feet and hands and her cropped head, though big for a woman’s, looked absurdly small in comparison to the breadth of her hips and shoulders.  She was reading the “Popular Science Monthly.”  This and the “Geographic” and “Current Events” were regularly taken by her and most thoroughly digested.  She read with keen intelligence; her comments were as shrewd as a knife-edge.  The chair she sat in was made from elk-horns and looked like the throne of some Norse chieftain.  Behind her on the wall hung the stuffed head of a huge walrus, his tusks gleaming, the gift of that exploring brother who seemed to be her only living relative.  There were other tokens of his wanderings, a polar-bear skin, an ivory Eskimo spear.  As a more homelike trophy Miss Blake had hung an elk head which she herself had laid low, a very creditable shot, though out of season.  She had been short of meat.  In the corner was a pianola topped by piles of record-boxes.  At her feet lay Berg, the dog, snoring faintly and as cozy as a kitten.

The firelight made Miss Blake’s face and hair ruddier than usual; her eyes, when she raised them for a glance at Sheila, looked as though they were full of red sparks which might at any instant break into flame.  Sheila was wearing one of her flimsy little black frocks, recovered from the wrinkles of its journey, and she had decorated her square-cut neck with some yellow flowers.  On these Miss Blake’s eyes rested every now and then with a sardonic gleam.