As soon as might be after the meal Virginia slipped away, carrying the rifle, the cartridges, the matches, and the salt.  She was cruelly frightened.

The night was providentially dark.  No aurora threw its splendor across the dome, and only a few rare stars peeped between the light cirrus clouds.  Virginia left behind her the buildings of the Post, she passed in safety the tin-steepled chapel and the church house; there remained only the Indian camp between her and the woods trail.  At once the dogs began to bark and howl, the fierce giddes lifting their pointed noses to the sky.  The girl hurried on, twinging far to the right through the grass.  To her relief the camp did not respond to the summons.  An old crone or so appeared in the flap of a teepee, eyes dazzled, to throw uselessly a billet of wood or a volley of Cree abuse at the animals nearest.  In a moment Virginia entered the trail.

Here was no light at all.  She had to proceed warily, feeling with her moccasins for the beaten pathway, to which she returned with infinite caution whenever she trod on grass or leaves.  Though her sight was dulled, her hearing was not.  A thousand scurrying noises swirled about her; a multitude of squeaks, whistles, snorts, and whines attested that she disturbed the forest creatures at their varied businesses; and underneath spoke an apparent dozen of terrifying voices which were in reality only the winds and the trees.  Virginia knew that these things were not dangerous—­that day light would show them to be only deer-mice, hares, weasels, bats, and owls—­nevertheless, they had their effect.  For about her was cloying velvet blackness—­not the closed-in blackness of a room, where one feels the embrace of the four walls, but the blackness of infinite space through which sweep mysterious currents of air.  After a long time she turned sharp to the left.  After a long time more she perceived a faint, opalescent glimmer in the distance ahead.  This she knew to be the river.

She felt her way onward, still cautiously, then she choked back a scream and dropped her burden with a clatter to the ground.  A dark figure seemed to have risen mysteriously at her side.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” said Ned Trent, in guarded tones.  “I heard you coming.  I thought you could hear me.”

He picked up the fallen articles, running his hands over them rapidly.

“Good,” he whispered.  “I got some moccasins to-day—­traded a few things I had in my pockets for them.  I’m fixed.”

“Have you a canoe?” she asked.

“Yes—­here on the beach.”

He preceded her down the few remaining yards of the trail.  She followed, already desolated at the thought of parting, for the wilderness was very big.  The bulk of the man partly blotted out the lucent spot where the river was—­now his arm, now his head, now the breadth of his shoulders.  This silhouette of him was dear to her, the sound of his movements, the faint stir of his breathing borne to her on the light breeze.  Virginia’s tender heart almost overflowed with longing and fear for him.