It is not a time when human beings are at their best and strongest.  There is an instinctive, haunting feeling which, though not fear, wakens a feeling of inadequacy and meekness.  Only a few—­those who have given their love and their lives to the wild places—­have any idea of sympathetic understanding with it.  Among these was Beatrice Neilson, and she herself did not fully understand the dreams and longings that swept her ever at the fall of the mysterious wilderness night.

The forest had never grown old to her.  Its mystery was undying.  Born in its shadow, her love had gone out to it in her earliest years, and it held her just as fast to-day.  All her dreams—­the natural longings of an imaginative girl born to live in an uninhabited portion of the earth—­were inextricably bound up in it; whatever plans she had for the future always included it.  Not that she was blind to its more terrible qualities:  its might and its utter remorselessness that all foresters, sooner or later, come to recognize.  Her thews were strong, and she loved it all the more for the tests that it put to its children.

She was a daughter of the forests, and its mark was on her.  To-night the same moon that, a thousand miles to the south, was lighting the way for Ben and Ezram on their northern journey, shone on her as she hastened down the long, shadowed street toward her father’s shack, revealing her forest parentage for all to see.  The quality could be discerned in her very carriage—­swift and graceful and silent—­vaguely suggesting that of the wild creatures themselves.  But there was no coarseness or ruggedness about her face and form such as superficial observation might have expected.  Physically she was like a deer, strong, straight-limbed, graceful, slender rather than buxom, dainty of hands and feet.  A perfect constitution and healthful surroundings had done all this.  And good fairies had worked further magic:  as she passed beneath the light at the door of the rude hotel there was revealed an unquestioned and rather startling facial beauty.

It seemed hardly fitting in this stern, rough land—­the soft contour and delicacy of the girl’s features.  It had come straight from her mother, a woman who, in gold-rush days, had been the acknowledged beauty of the province.  Nor was it merely the attractive, animal beauty that is so often seen in healthy, rural girls.  Rather its loveliness was of a mysterious, haunting kind that one associates with old legends and far distant lands.

Perhaps its particular appeal lay in her eyes.  They seemed to be quite marvelously deep and clear, so darkly gray that they looked black in certain lights, and they were so shadowed and pensive that sometimes they gave the image of actual sadness.  For all the isolation of her home she was no stranger to romance; but the romance that was to be seen, like a gentleness, in her face was that of the great, shadowed forest in which she dwelt.