The storm was still raging when he alighted that evening from the up coach at the trail nearest his house.  Although incumbered with a heavy carpet-bag, he started resignedly on his two-mile tramp without begrudging the neighborly act of his wife which had deprived him of his horse.  It was “like her” to do these things in her good-humored abstraction, an abstraction, however, that sometimes worried him, from the fear that it indicated some unhappiness with her present lot.  He was longing to rejoin her after his absence of three days, the longest time they had been separated since their marriage, and he hurried on with a certain lover-like excitement, quite new to his usually calm and temperate blood.

Struggling with the storm and darkness, but always with the happy consciousness of drawing nearer to her in that struggle, he labored on, finding his perilous way over the indistinguishable trail by certain landmarks in the distance, visible only to his pioneer eye.  That heavier shadow to the right was not the hillside, but the slope to the distant hill; that low, regular line immediately before him was not a fence or wall, but the line of distant gigantic woods, a mile from his home.  Yet as he began to descend the slope towards the wood, he stopped and rubbed his eyes.  There was distinctly a light in it.  His first idea was that he had lost the trail and was nearing the woodman Mackinnon’s cabin.  But a more careful scrutiny revealed to him that it was really the wood, and the light was a camp-fire.  It was a rough night for camping out, but they were probably some belated prospectors.

When he had reached the fringe of woodland, he could see quite plainly that the fire was built beside one of the large pines, and that the little encampment, which looked quite comfortable and secluded from the storm-beaten trail, was occupied apparently by a single figure.  By the good glow of the leaping fire, that figure standing erect before it, elegantly shaped, in the graceful folds of a serape, looked singularly romantic and picturesque, and reminded Joshua Rylands—­whose ideas of art were purely reminiscent of boyish reading—­of some picture in a novel.  The heavy black columns of the pines, glancing out of the concave shadow, also seemed a fitting background to what might have been a scene in a play.  So strongly was he impressed by it that but for his anxiety to reach his home, still a mile distant, and the fact that he was already late, he would have penetrated the wood and the seclusion of the stranger with an offer of hospitality for the night.  The man, however, was evidently capable of taking care of himself, and the outline of a tethered horse was faintly visible under another tree.  It might be a surveyor or engineer,—­the only men of a better class who were itinerant.