Her existence at Conjuror’s House was perhaps a little complex, but it was familiar.  She knew the people, and she took a daily and unwearying delight in the kindness and simplicity of their bearing toward herself.  Each detail of life came to her in the round of habit, wearing the garment of accustomed use.  But of the world she knew nothing except what she had been able to body forth from her reading, and that had merely given her imagination something tangible with which to feed her self-distrust.

“Must I decide at once?” she asked.

“If you go this year, it must be with the Abitibi brigade.  You have until then.”

“Thank you, father.” said the girl, sweetly.

The shadows stole their surroundings one by one, until only the bright silver of the tea-service, and the glitter of polished wood, and the square of the open door remained.  Galen Albret became an inert dark mass.  Virginia’s gray was lost in that of the twilight.

Time passed.  The clock ticked on.  Faintly sounds penetrated from the kitchen, and still more faintly from out of doors.  Then the rectangle of the door-way was darkened by a man peering uncertainly.  The man wore his hat, from which slanted a slender heron’s plume; his shoulders were square; his thighs slim and graceful.

Against the light, one caught the outline of the sash’s tassel and the fringe of his leggings.

“Are you there, Galen Albret?” he challenged.

The spell of twilight mystery broke.  It seemed as if suddenly the air had become surcharged with the vitality of opposition.

“What then?” countered the Factor’s heavy, deliberate tones.

“True, I see you now,” rejoined the visitor carelessly, as he flung himself across the arm of a chair and swung one foot.  “I do not doubt you are convinced by this time of my intention.”

“My recollection does not tell me what messenger I sent to ask this interview.”

“Correct,” laughed the young man a little hardly.  “You didn’t ask it.  I attended to that myself.  What you want doesn’t concern me in the least.  What do you suppose I care what, or what not, any of this crew wants?  I’m master of my own ideas, anyway, thank God.  If you don’t like what I do, you can always stop me.”  In the tone of his voice was a distinct challenge.  Galen Albret, it seemed, chose to pass it by.

“True,” he replied sombrely, after a barely perceptible pause to mark his tacit displeasure.  “It is your hour.  Say on.”

“I should like to know the date at which I take la Longue Traverse.”

“You persist in that nonsense?”

“Call my departure whatever you want to—­I have the name for it.  When do I leave?”

“I have not decided.”

“And in the meantime?”

“Do as you please.”

“Ah, thanks for this generosity,” cried the young man, in a tone of declamatory sarcasm so artificial as fairly to scent the elocutionary.  “To do as I please—­here—­now there’s a blessed privilege!  I may walk around where I want to, talk to such as have a good word for me, punish those who have not!  But do I err in concluding that the state of your game law is such that it would be useless to reclaim my rifle from the engaging Placide?”