"What was very queer?" asked Ainley.
"That girl's action. Did you see how she looked at you? She was going to speak to you and changed her mind."
Ainley laughed a trifle uneasily. "Possibly she blames me for the disappearance of her lover!"
"But why should she do that? She can hardly know of your previous acquaintance with him."
"You forget—she saw him speak to me yesterday!"
"Ah yes," was the girl's reply. "I had forgotten that." The notes of a bugle, clear and silvery in the still air, floated across the meadow at that moment, and Gerald Ainley laughed.
"The breakfast bell! We must hurry, Miss Yardely. It will scarcely do to keep your uncle waiting."
They turned and hurried back to the Post, nothing more being said in reference to Miskodeed and Hubert Stane. And an hour later, in the bustle of the departure, the whole matter was brushed aside by Helen Yardely, though now and again through the day, it recurred to her mind as a rather unpleasant episode; and she found herself wondering how so fine a man as Stane could stoop to the folly of which many men in the North were guilty.
At the end of that day her uncle ordered the camp to be pitched on a little meadow backed by a sombre forest of spruce. And after the evening meal, in company with Gerald Ainley, she walked towards the timber where an owl was hooting dismally. The air was perfectly still, the sky above crystal clear, and the Northern horizon filled with a golden glow. As they reached the shadow of the spruce, and seated themselves on a fallen trunk, a fox barked somewhere in the recess of the wood, and from afar came the long-drawn melancholy howl of a wolf. Helen Yardely looked down the long reach of the river and her eyes fixed themselves on a tall bluff crowned with spruce, distant perhaps a mile and a half away.
"I like the Wild," she said suddenly, breaking the silence that had been between them.