After I had been there some time I was suddenly surprised by Morley.

“Hullo!” he exclaimed.  “You here?  Why, I thought you would be in the arms of the fair Suzee by this time.”

“So I might have been,” I answered, looking up from the sketch, “but I got put off somehow, so I left her and went to church instead!”

Morley burst out laughing.

“You are the funniest fellow,” he exclaimed, taking his seat beside me on the ground and clasping his hands round his knees.  “So Suzee has offended you, has she?  Do you know, I think that’s where we ordinary people get ahead of fellows like you.  You are too sensitive.  We’re not so particular.  When I’m stuck on Mary Ann it doesn’t matter to me what she says or does.  It doesn’t interfere with my happiness.”

I went on painting in silence.

“Funny those chaps look with their long hair, don’t they?” he remarked after a moment, as I painted the light on the priest’s long curl.

“Very picturesque, don’t you think?” I said.

“No, I don’t,” returned the Briton stoutly.  “I think it’s beastly.”

I laughed this time, and having completed the portrait, slipped it into my portfolio and prepared to put away my paints.

“Don’t you want any dinner?” asked Morley.  “You must be hungry.”

“Well, I hadn’t thought of it,” I answered.  “But, now you mention it, perhaps I am.  Do you know of any place where one can get anything?”

“There’s one place at the end of the town where you can have soup and bread,” replied Morley, and we started off to find it.

Later on, towards ten o’clock, when we were leaving the little, frame, sailors’ restaurant, I looked up to the western sky and saw that strange colour in it of the Alaskan sunset that I have never found in any other sky, a bright magenta, or deep heather pink, a crude colour rather like an aniline dye, but brilliant and arresting in the clean, clear gold of the heavens.

Great ribs and bars and long flat lines of it lay all across the West.  No other cloud, no other colour appeared anywhere in the sky.  It was painted in those two tints alone; the brightest magenta conceivable and living gold.

Walking back slowly to the ship, I gazed at it with interest.  No other sky that I could recall ever shows this tone of colour.  Pink, scarlet, rose, and all the shades of blood or flame-colour are familiar in every sunset, but this curious tint seemed to belong to Alaska alone.

I watched it glow and deepen, then fade, and softly disappear as the sun dipped below the horizon.

CHAPTER III

IN THE WOOD

The next evening, after dinner, I left the ship and made my way to Suzee’s place to take her for the promised walk.

It was just seven when I stepped ashore, and light of the purest, most exquisite gold lay over everything.  The air had that special quality of Alaska which I have never met anywhere else, an extreme humidity; it hung upon the cheek as a mist hangs, only it was clear as crystal, brilliant as a yellow diamond.