he noted the old-rose flush in her cheeks, the fire of rich, red blood glowing under her dark skin.  Thoreau himself blubbered and spouted in his ice-water bath like a joyous porpoise, and he rubbed himself on the burlap until the two apple-red spots above his beard shone like the glow that had spread over the top of the stove.  David found himself noticing these things—­very small things though they were; he discovered himself taking a sudden and curious interest in events and things of no importance at all, even in the quick, deft slash of the Frenchman’s long knife as he cut up the huge whitefish that was to be their breakfast.  He watched Marie as she wallowed the thick slices in yellow corn-meal, and listened to the first hissing sputter of them as they were dropped into the hot grease of the skillet.  And the odour of the fish, taken only yesterday from the net which Thoreau kept in the frozen lake, made him hungry.  This was unusual.  It was unexpected as other things that had happened.  It puzzled him.

He returned to his room, with a suspicion in his mind that he should put on a collar and tie, and his coat.  He changed his mind when he saw the photograph in its newspaper wrapping on the table.  In another moment it was in his hands.  Now, with day in the room, the sun shining, he expected to see a change.  But there was no change in her; she was there, as he had left her last night; the question was in her eyes, unspoken words still on her lips.  Then, suddenly, it swept upon him where he had been in those first hours of peaceful slumber that had come to him—­beside a quiet, dark pool—­gently whispering forests about him—­an angel standing close to him, on a rock, shrouded in her hair—­watching over him.  A thrill passed through him.  Was it possible?...  He did not finish the question.  He could not bring himself to ask whether this picture—­some strange spirit it might possess—­had reached out to him, quieted him, made him sleep, brought him dreams that were like a healing medicine.  And yet....

He remembered that in one of his leather bags there was a magnifying glass, and he assured himself that he was merely curious—­most casually curious—­as he hunted it out from among his belongings and scanned the almost illegible writing on the back of the cardboard mount.  He made out the date quite easily now, impressed in the cardboard by the point of a pencil.  It was only a little more than a year old.  It was unaccountable why this discovery should affect him as it did.  He made no effort to measure or sound the satisfaction it gave him—­this knowledge that the girl had stood so recently on that rock beside the pool.  He was beginning to personalize her unconsciously, beginning to think of her mentally as the Girl.  She was a bit friendly.  With her looking at him like that he did not feel quite so alone with himself.  And there could not be much of a change in her since that yesterday of a year ago, when some one had startled her there.