sharp but humane, put a term to its struggles.

While Dave gazed admiringly at the glittering spoil, Miranda began untying the line from the float.

"What air ye doin' now, Mirandy?" he inquired, as she proceeded to strip the bait from the remaining hooks, and throw the pieces overboard.

"We won't want any more togue for

a week," she explained.

a fine, big one."

"This is such

And she headed the

canoe for the landing-place, under the

shadow of the point.

TH

Chapter XV

A Venison Steak

HROUGHOUT the succeeding winter Dave managed to visit the clearing two or three times in the course of each month, but he could not see that he made any progress in Miranda's favour. As at first, she was sometimes friendly, sometimes caustically indifferent. Only once did he perceive in her the smallest hint of gratification at his coming. That was the time when he came on his snowshoes through the forest by moonlight, the snow giving a diffused glimmer that showed him the trail even through the densest thickets. Arriving in the morning, he surprised her at the door of the cow stable, where she had been foddering the cattle. Her face flushed at the sight of him; and a look came into her wide, dark eyes which even his modesty could

not quite misunderstand. But his delight quickly crumbled. Miranda was loftily indifferent to him during all that visit, so much so that after he had gone Kirstie reproached her with incivility.

"I can't help it, mother!" she explained. "I don't want to hate him, but what better is he than a butcher? His bread is stained with blood. Pah! I sometimes think I smell blood, the blood of the kind wood creatures, when he's around."

"But you don't want him not to come, girl, surely," protested her mother.

Well, you know, it's a pleasure to you to have him come once in a while," said the girl, enigmatically.

Dave continued his visits, biding his time. He lost no chance of familiarizing Miranda's imagination with the needs of man as he imagined them, and with a rational conception of life as he conceived it. This he did not directly, but through the medium of conversation with Kirstie, to whom his words were sweetness. He was determined to break down Miranda's

prejudice against his calling, which to him was the only one worth a man's while, — wholesome, sane, full of adventure, full of romance. He was determined, also, to overcome her deep aversion to flesh food. He felt that not till these two points were gained would Miranda become sufficiently human to understand human love or any truly human emotions. In this belief he strictly withheld his wooing, and waited till the barriers that opposed it should be undermined by his systematic attacks. He was too little learned in woman to realize that with Miranda his best wooing was the absence of all wooing; and so he builded better than he knew.

During the cold months he was glad to be relieved of the presence of Kroof, who had proved, in her taciturn way, quite irreconcilable. He had tried in vain to purchase her favour with honey, good hive bees' honey in the comb, carried all the way from the Settlement. She would have nothing to do with him at any price; and he felt that this discredited him in

Miranda's eyes. He hoped that Kroof

would sleep late that spring in her lair under the pine root.

But while Dave was labouring so assiduously, and, as he fancied, so subtly, to mould and fashion Miranda, she all unawares was moulding him. Unconsciously his rifle and his traps were losing zest for him; and the utter solitude of his camp beyond the Quah-Davic began to have manifest disadvantages. Once he hesitated so long over a good shot at a lynx, just because the creature looked unsuspecting, that in the end he was too late, and his store of pelts was the poorer by one good skin. Shooting a young cow moose in the deep snow, moreover, he felt an unwonted qualm when the gasping and bleeding beast turned upon him a look of anguished reproach. His hand was not quite so steady as usual when he gave her the knife in the throat. This was a weakness which he did not let himself examine too closely. He knew the flesh of the young cow was tender and good, and after freezing it he hung it up in his cold cellar. Though he would not for