dence. It was characteristic of his quietly masterful nature that he not once thought of conciliating by giving up gun and trap and turning to a vocation more humane. No, the ways and means which occupied his thoughts were the ways and means of converting Miranda to his own point of view. He felt, though not philosophic enough to formulate it clearly, that he had all nature behind him to help mould the girl to his will, while she stood not only alone, but with a grave peril of treason in her own heart.

His silence was good policy with Miranda, who was used to silence and loved it. But being a woman, she loved another's silence even better than her own. "You are a hunter, ain't you?" she inquired at last, without turning her head. "Yes, Mirandy."

"And a trapper, too?"

"Yes, Mirandy; so they call me." "And you like to kill the beasts?" "Well, yes, Mirandy, kind of, leastways, I like them; and, well, you've jest got to kill them, to live yourself. That's

jest what they do, kill each other, so's they can live themselves. An' it's the only kind of life I can live-'way in the woods, with the shadows, an' the silence, an' the trees, an' the sky, an' the clean smells, an' the whispers you can't never understand."

Dave shut his mouth with a firm snap at the close of this unwonted outburst. Never to any one before had he so explained his passion for the hunter's life; and now Miranda, who had turned square about, was looking at him with a curious searching expression. It disconcerted him; and he feared, under those unescapable eyes, that he had talked nonsense. Nevertheless when she spoke there was a less chilling note in her voice, though the words were not encouraging.

"If you like killing the creatures," she said slowly, "it's no place for you here. So maybe you hadn't better come to the clearing."

"I don't like killing your beasts, anyways," he protested eagerly. "An' ever sence I heard how you an' the bears an'

the caribou was friends like, I've kep' clear the other side of the divide, an' never set a trap this side the Quah-Davic valley. As for these critters you take such stock in, Mirandy, I wouldn't harm a hair of one of 'em, I swear!

"You hadn't better! I'd kill you myself," she rejoined sharply, with a swift, dangerous flame in her strange gaze; Vor I'd set Kroof on you," she added, a gleam of mirth suddenly irradiating her face, and darkening her eyes richly, till Dave was confused by her loveliness. But he kept his wits sufficiently to perceive, as she set her face again up the trail, that he was permitted to go with her.

"Who's Kroof?" he asked humbly, stepping close to her side and ignoring the fact that the pathway, just there, was but wide enough for one.

"My best friend," answered Miranda. "You'll see at the clearing. You'd better look out for Kroof, let me tell you!"

M

D

Chapter XII

Young Dave at the Clearing

URING the rest of the journey

a matter of an hour's walkingthere was little talk between Miranda and Dave; for the ancient wood has the property that it makes talk seem trivial. With those who journey through the great vistas and clear twilight of the trees, thoughts are apt to interchange by the medium of silence and sympathy, or else to remain uncommunicated. Whatever her misgivings, her resentments and hostilities, Miranda was absorbed in her companion. So deeply was she absorbed that she failed to notice an unwonted emptiness in the shadows about her.

In very truth, the furtive folk had all fled away. The presence of the hunter filled them with instinctive fear; and in their chief defence, their moveless self

effacement, they had no more any confidence while within reach of Miranda's eyes. The stranger was like herselfand though they trusted her in all else, they knew the compulsion of nature, and feared lest she might betray them to her own kind. Therefore they held prudently aloof, the hare and the porcupine, the fox and the red cat; the raccoon slipped into his hole in the maple tree, and the wood-mice scurried under the hemlock root, and the woodpecker kept the thickness of a tree beween his foraging and Miranda's eye. Only the careless and inquisitive partridge, sitting on a birch limb just over the trail, curiously awaited their approach; till suddenly an intuition of peril awoke him, and he fled on wild wings away through the diminishing arches. Even the little brown owl in the pine crotch snapped his bill and hissed uneasily as the two passed under his perch. Yet all these signs, that would have been to her in other moods a loud proclamation of change, now passed unnoted. Miranda was receiving a new