At this flaming triumph the silence of earth was broken, and ten thousand wolf-dogs, in long-drawn unisoned howls, sobbed their dismay and grief.  Frona shivered, and St. Vincent passed his arm about her waist.  The woman in her was aware of the touch of man, and of a slight tingling thrill of vague delight; but she made no resistance.  And as the wolf-dogs mourned at her feet and the aurora wantoned overhead, she felt herself drawn against him closely.

“Need I tell my story?” he whispered.

She drooped her head in tired content on his shoulder, and together they watched the burning vault wherein the stars dimmed and vanished.  Ebbing, flowing, pulsing to some tremendous rhythm, the prism colors hurled themselves in luminous deluge across the firmament.  Then the canopy of heaven became a mighty loom, wherein imperial purple and deep sea-green blended, wove, and interwove, with blazing woof and flashing warp, till the most delicate of tulles, fluorescent and bewildering, was daintily and airily shaken in the face of the astonished night.

Without warning the span was sundered by an arrogant arm of black.  The arch dissolved in blushing confusion.  Chasms of blackness yawned, grew, and rushed together.  Broken masses of strayed color and fading fire stole timidly towards the sky-line.  Then the dome of night towered imponderable, immense, and the stars came back one by one, and the wolf-dogs mourned anew.

“I can offer you so little, dear,” the man said with a slightly perceptible bitterness.  “The precarious fortunes of a gypsy wanderer.”

And the woman, placing his hand and pressing it against her heart, said, as a great woman had said before her, “A tent and a crust of bread with you, Richard.”

CHAPTER XIX

How-ha was only an Indian woman, bred of a long line of fish-eating, meat-rending carnivores, and her ethics were as crude and simple as her blood.  But long contact with the whites had given her an insight into their way of looking at things, and though she grunted contemptuously in her secret soul, she none the less understood their way perfectly.  Ten years previous she had cooked for Jacob Welse, and served him in one fashion or another ever since; and when on a dreary January morning she opened the front door in response to the deep-tongued knocker, even her stolid presence was shaken as she recognized the visitor.  Not that the average man or woman would have so recognized.  But How-ha’s faculties of observing and remembering details had been developed in a hard school where death dealt his blow to the lax and life saluted the vigilant.