“Yes,” said Blake slowly.  “Mrs. Thoreau—­is—­at home.”

L’ANGE

She stood in the doorway of a log cabin that was overgrown with woodvine and mellow with the dull red glow of the climbing bakneesh, with the warmth of the late summer sun falling upon her bare head.  Cummins’ shout had brought her to the door when we were still half a rifle shot down the river; a second shout, close to shore, brought her running down toward me.  In that first view that I had of her, I called her beautiful.  It was chiefly, I believe, because of her splendid hair.  John Cummins’ shout of homecoming had caught her with it undone, and she greeted us with the dark and lustrous masses of it sweeping about her shoulders and down to her hips.  That is, she greeted Cummins, for he had been gone for nearly a month.  I busied myself with the canoe for that first half minute or so.

Then it was that I received my introduction and for the first time touched the hand of Melisse Cummins, the Florence Nightingale of several thousand square miles of northern wilderness.  I saw, then, that what I had at first taken for our own hothouse variety of beauty was a different thing entirely, a type that would have disappointed many because of its strength and firmness.  Her hair was a glory, brown and soft.  No woman could have criticized its loveliness.  But the flush that I had seen in her face, flower-like at a short distance, was a tan that was almost a man’s tan.  Her eyes were of a deep blue and as clear as the sky; but in them, too, there was a strength that was not altogether feminine.  There was strength in her face, strength in the poise of her firm neck, strength in every movement of her limbs and body.  When she spoke, it was in a voice which, like her hair, was adorable.  I had never heard a sweeter voice, and her firm mouth was all at once not only gentle and womanly, but almost girlishly pretty.

I could understand, now, why Melisse Cummins was the heroine of a hundred true tales of the wilderness, and I could understand as well why there was scarcely a cabin or an Indian hut in that ten thousand square miles of wilderness in which she had not, at one time or another, been spoken of as “L’ange Meleese.”  And yet, unlike that other “angel” of flesh and blood, Florence Nightingale, the story of Melisse Cummins and her work will live and die with her in that little cabin two hundred miles straight north of civilization.  No, that is wrong.  For the wilderness will remember.  It will remember, as it has remembered Father Duchene and the Missioner of Lac Bain and the heroic days of the early voyageurs.  A hundred “Meleeses” will bear her memory in name—­for all who speak her name call her “Meleese,” and not Melisse.