"No." Marian was busy with the mail.
"Jist gossip, I reckon, but they say she's left her Eskimo husband—"
Marian did not answer. Gossip did not interest her. Besides, she had found a letter that did interest her even more than those addressed to her. A very careful penman had drawn the Greek letters, Phi Beta Ki, on the outside of an envelope, and beneath it had written, "Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska."
"Wha—"
She was on the point of sharing the mystery with the carrier, but checked herself. Just some new gossip for him, was her mental comment.
"Here's the sack," she said, noting that he had finished drinking the coffee she had prepared for him. "I hope there'll be more mail next time. Letters mean so much to these people up at the top of the world. Spring thaw'll be here pretty soon, then they can't get mail for two or three months."
"That's right; it's fierce," said the carrier, taking the sack and turning toward the door.
"Phi Beta Ki," Marian pronounced the letters softly to herself as the door closed. "Now who could that be?"
She was still puzzling over the mysterious letter when, after a hasty luncheon, she again took up her palette and brushes and wound her way around the hill to a point where stood a cabinet, ten feet square and made of fiber-board.
She returned to her painting. She was doing a mass of ice that was piling some two hundred yards out to sea. The work was absorbing, yet, eager as she was to work, her mind went back to that letter in the pigeon-hole up in the cabin.