Relief shot into her eyes at his words.

“Two years?  What do you mean?”

“I’ve been up along the rim of h—­I mean the Arctic, on a government wild-goose chase,” he explained.  “And I’m just coming down.”

“You’re from the North?”

There was an eager emphasis in her question.

“Yes.  Straight from Coronation Gulf.  I ran ashore to cook a mess of prunes.  While the water was boiling I came down here after a bear, and found you!  My name is Philip Weyman; I haven’t even an Indian with me, and there are three things in the world I’d trade that name for just now:  One is pie, another is doughnuts, and the third—­”

She brushed back her hair, and the fear went from her eyes as she looked at him.

“And the third?” she asked.

“Is the answer to a question,” he finished.  “How do you happen to be here, six hundred miles from anywhere?”

She stepped out from the rock.  And now he saw that she was almost as tall as himself, and that she was as slim as a reed and as beautifully poised as the wild narcissus that sways like music to every call of the wind.  She had tucked up her sleeves, baring her round white arms close to the shoulders, and as she looked steadily at him before answering his question she flung back the shining masses of her hair and began to braid it.  Her fear for him was entirely gone.  She was calm.  And there was something in the manner of her quiet and soul-deep study of him that held back other words which he might have spoken.

In those few moments she had taken her place in his life.  She stood before him like a goddess, tall and slender and unafraid, her head a gold-brown aureole, her face filled with a purity, a beauty, and a strength that made him look at her speechless, waiting for the sound of her voice.  In her look there was neither boldness nor suspicion.  Her eyes were clear, deep pools of velvety blue that defied him to lie to her, He felt that under those eyes he could have knelt down upon the sand and emptied his soul of its secrets for their inspection.

“It is not very strange that I should be here” she said at last.  “I have always lived here.  It is my home.”

“Yes, I believe that,” breathed Philip.  “It is the last thing in the world that one would believe—­but I do; I believe it.  Something—­I don’t know what—­told me that you belonged to this world as you stood there beside the rock.  But I don’t understand.  A thousand miles from a city—­and you!  It’s unreal.  It’s almost like the dreams I’ve been dreaming during the past eighteen months, and the visions I’ve seen during that long, maddening night up on the coast, when for five months we didn’t see a glow of the sun.  But—­you understand—­it’s hard to comprehend.”

From her he glanced swiftly over the rocks of the coulee, as if expecting to see some sign of the home she had spoken of, or at least of some other human presence.  She understood his questioning look.  “I am alone,” she said.