They made fast the boat, and Anderson found a mossy seat under a tall pine from which the lightning of a recent storm had stripped a great limb, leaving a crimson gash in the trunk.

And there Elizabeth nestled to him, and he with his arm about her, and the intoxication of her slender beauty mastering his senses, tried to answer her as a plain man may.

The commonplaces of passion--its foolish promises--its blind confidence--its trembling joy--there is no other path for love to travel by, and Elizabeth and Anderson trod it like their fellows.
Six months later on a clear winter evening Elizabeth was standing in the sitting-room of a Saskatchewan farmhouse.

She looked out upon a dazzling world of snow, lying thinly under a pale greenish sky in which the sunset clouds were just beginning to gather.

The land before her sloped to a broad frozen river up which a wagon and a team of horses was plodding its way--the steam rising in clouds round the bodies of the horses and men.