She was splendid as she stood there, an exquisite human touch in the savageness of the world about her--and yet strangely wild as she faced David, protecting with her own quivering body the great beast behind her.

To David, in the first immensity of his astonishment, she had seemed to be a woman; but now she looked to him like a child, a very young girl.

Perhaps it was the way her hair fell in a tangled riot of curling tresses over her shoulders and breast; the slimness of her; the shortness of her skirt; the unfaltering clearness of the great, blue eyes that were staring at him; and, above all else, the manner in which she had spoken her name.

The bear might have been nothing more than a rock to him now, against which she was leaning.

He did not hear Baree's low growling.