and cakes.  The country was full of game.  In the valleys the black currants and wild raspberries were ripening lusciously, and now and then in the pools of the lower valleys David would shoot fish.  Both Tara and Baree began to grow fat, and with quiet joy David noticed that each day added to the wonderful beauty and happiness in the Girl’s face, and it seemed to him that her love was enveloping him more and more, and there never was a moment now that he could not see the glow of it in her eyes.  It thrilled him that she did not want him out of her presence for more than a few minutes at a time.  He loved to fondle her hair, and she had a sweet habit of running her fingers through his own, and telling him each time how she loved it because it was a little gray; and she had a still sweeter way of holding one of his hands in hers when she was sitting beside him, and pressing it now and then to her soft lips.

They had been ten days in the mountains when, one evening, sitting beside him in this way, she said, with that adorable and almost childish ingenuousness which he loved in her: 

“It will be nice to have Father Roland marry us, Sakewawin!” And before he could answer, she added:  “I will keep house for you two at the Chateau.”

He had been thinking a great deal about it.

“But if your mother should live down there—­among the cities?” he asked.

She shivered a little, and nestled to him.

“I wouldn’t like it, Sakewawin—­not for long.  I love this—­the forest, the mountains, the skies.”  And then, suddenly she caught herself, and added quickly:  “But anywhere—­anywhere—­if you are there, Sakewawin!”

“I too, love the forests, the mountains, and the skies,” he whispered.  “We will have them with us always, little comrade.”

It was the fourteenth day when they descended the eastern slopes of the Divide, and he knew that they were not far from the Kwadocha and the Finley.  Their fifteenth night they camped where he and the Butterfly’s lover had built a noonday fire; and this night, though it was warm and glorious with a full moon, the Girl was possessed of a desire to have a fire of their own, and she helped to add fuel to it until the flames leaped high up into the shadows of the spruce, and drove them far back with its heat.  David was content to sit and smoke his pipe while he watched her flit here and there after still more fuel, now a shadow in the darkness, and then again in the full fireglow.  After a time she grew tired and nestled down beside him, spreading her hair over his breast and about his face in the way she knew he loved, and for an hour after that they talked in whispering voices that trembled with their happiness.  When at last she went to bed, and fell asleep, he walked a little way out into the clear moonlight and sat down to smoke and listen to the murmur of the valley, his heart too full for sleep.  Suddenly he was startled by a voice.