No matter how well-to-do in money and gear people may be, if they leave the beaten tracks of civilization and immure themselves in the wilderness they will have to learn to help themselves or else suffer hardship.  So Mary Selincourt, whose father’s yearly income was a good way advanced in a four-figured total, found herself compelled to the necessity of lighting her own fire, or going without the tea.  There was plenty of kindling wood close to her hand, so the task presented no especial difficulty, but she laughed softly to herself as she watched the leaping flames, and thought how astonished some of her aristocratic friends would be if they could see her doing domestic work amid such humble surroundings.

When the kettle began to sing she went into the little sitting-room to set the table for tea, and was enjoying the work as if it were play and she a child again, when a sound of voices and footsteps brought her in haste to the open door.  Two of the boatmen were coming up the path from the river leading a mud-coated figure whom at first Mary did not recognise.  But a second glance showed her that it was really her father.  With a cry of alarm she met him at the door, full of concern for his uncomfortable plight, yet not for a moment realizing how terrible his danger had been.

“Dear Father, where have you been?” she cried.

“Within a hand-grip of death,” he answered, with a quaver of breakdown in his voice, for it had shaken him fearfully, that long, slow torture of being sucked into the green ooze of the muskeg.

“Don’t talk about it!” she said hastily.  “I will put your clean things ready.  There is happily a kettle on the boil; the men will help you to bath, and when you are in bed I will bring you tea.”

“Yes,” he answered languidly, while she flew to get things ready, and called one of the men to assist her in putting water into the big tin pan which was the only bath the house afforded.

She was going to put the pan in the bedroom, when the man who was helping stopped her with a suggestion.  “You had better leave the pan here in front of the fire, Miss; the poor gentleman is so exhausted, you see, and the fire will be a comfort to him.”

“I had not thought of that, but I am quite sure you are right,” she said; then got the water to a comfortable temperature, and left the men to do their best.

They were prompt and speedy.  In half an hour Mr. Selincourt was lying in bed, spent and faint it is true, but as clean as soap and water could make him.  Mary hovered about him with a world of tenderness in face and manner, but she would not let him talk, would not even let him tell her how or where he had come so near to finding his death on that sunny June afternoon.  It was not until he was asleep that she ventured to go back to the kitchen.  The men had removed all traces of their work by cleaning the splashed floor, and were busy now in the open space behind the house washing the mud-caked clothes which they had stripped from Mr. Selincourt, for those men who go on portage work must have at least an elementary knowledge of washing, or be content to go without clean shirts most of their time.