“No....  Do you think you’ll make a full-fledged picture from this motive?”

“How did you guess?”

“I don’t know.  I’ve a premonition that your reputation is going to soar up like a blazing star from this waste of snow around us....  I wish—­I wish that it might be from me, through me—­my humble aid—­that your glory breaks out——­”

“If it ever does, it will do it through you.  I told you that long ago.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve known it a long, long time, Geraldine.  Without you there’s nothing to me except surface.  You are the depths of me.”

“And you of me, Duane.”  Sweet eyes remote, she stood looking into space; at peace with her soul, dreaming, content.  And it was then that he caught and imprisoned in colour the nameless beauty which was the foundation for his first famous picture, whose snowy splendour silenced all except those little critics who chirp automatically, eternally, on the ruddy hearthstone of the gods.

* * * * *

From the distant hill-top a voice bellowed at them through a megaphone; and, looking aloft, they beheld Scott gesticulating.

“If you two mental irresponsibles want any breakfast,” he shouted, “you’d better hustle!  Miller telephones that the big boar fed below Cloudy Mountain at sunrise!”

Geraldine looked at her lover, cheeks pink with excitement.  He was immensely interested, too, and as soon as he could fold his easel, lock up brushes and palette, protect his canvas with a fresh one faced with cork buffers, they started for the house, discussing the chances for a shot that afternoon.

Like the most desirable and wary of most species of game, furry or finny, the huge, heavily tusked veterans of the wild-boar family often feed after dark, being too cunning to banquet by daylight and carouse with the gayer blades and the big, fierce sows of the neighbourhood.

Sometimes in the white gloom of snow-storms there is a chance for a shot; sometimes in a remoter fastness a big boar may deem himself secure enough to venture out where there are no witnesses to his solitary gastronomic revels save an Arctic owl or two huddled high in the hemlocks.

And it was in the rocky oak-ridges of the wild country under Cloudy Mountain that Miller had marked down the monarch of all wild pigs—­the great, shaggy, silver-tipped boar, hock-deep in snow, crunching frozen acorns and glaring off over the gully where mile after mile of white valley and mountain ranges stretched away, clotted and streaked with pine.

“Why don’t we all go?” asked Geraldine, seating herself behind the coffee-urn and looking cordially around at the others.

“Because, dear,” said Kathleen, “I haven’t the slightest desire to run after a wild boar or permit him to amble after me; and all that reconciles me to your doing it is that Duane is going with you.”

“I personally don’t like to kill things,” observed Scott briefly.  “My sister is the primitive of this outfit.  She’s the slayer, the head hunter, the lady-boss of this kraal.”