There was not the slightest suspicion of apology in her voice as she smoothed back her hair where he had crumpled it.  It was as if she belonged here, and had always belonged here, and was giving him permission to enter her domain.  Shock was beginning to pass away from him, and he could feel his feet upon the earth once more.  His spirit-visions of her as she had walked hand in hand with him during the past weeks, her soft eyes filled with love, faded away before the reality of Mary Standish in flesh and blood, her quiet mastery of things, her almost omniscient unapproachableness.  He reached out his hands, but there was a different light in his eyes, and she placed her own in them confidently.

“It was like a bolt of lightning,” he said, his voice free at last and trembling.  “Day and night I have been thinking of you, dreaming of you, and cursing myself because I believed I had killed you.  And now I find you alive.  And here!”

She was so near that the hands he clasped lay against his breast.  But reason had returned to him, and he saw the folly of dreams.

“It is difficult to believe.  Out there I thought I was sick.  Perhaps I am.  But if I am not sick, and you are really you, I am glad.  If I wake up and find I have imagined it all, as I imagined so many of the other things—­”

He laughed, freeing her hands and looking into eyes shining half out of tears at him.  But he did not finish.  She drew away from him, with a lingering of her finger-tips on his arm, and the little heart-beat in her throat revealed itself clearly again as on that night in his cabin.

“I have been thinking of you back there, every hour, every step,” he said, making a gesture toward the tundras over which he had come.  “Then I heard the firecrackers and saw the flag.  It is almost as if I had created you!”

A quick answer was on her lips, but she stopped it.

“And when I found you here, and you didn’t fade away like a ghost, I thought something was wrong with my head.  Something must have been wrong, I guess, or I wouldn’t have done that.  You see, it puzzled me that a ghost should be setting off firecrackers—­and I suppose that was the first impulse I had of making sure you were real.”

A voice came from the edge of the cottonwoods beyond them.  It was a clear, wild voice with a sweet trill in it. “Maa-rie!” it called. “Maa-rie!”

“Supper,” nodded the girl.  “You are just in time.  And then we are going home in the twilight.”

It made his heart thump, that casual way in which she spoke of his place as home.  She went ahead of him, with the sun glinting in the soft coils of her hair, and he picked up his rifle and followed, eyes and soul filled only with the beauty of her slim figure—­a glory of life where for a long time he had fashioned a spirit of the dead.  They came into an open, soft with grass and strewn with flowers, and in this open a man was kneeling beside