"Well, if another one comes, remember it's mine! Mine!" growled the man, as he went stamping out of the room.
"Old Rover," Marian said, taking the dog's head between her hands. "I'm glad you're here. When there are such men as that about, we need you."
And yet, as she spoke her heart was full of misgivings. What if this man's looks belied his nature? What if he were honest? And what if her good-looking college boy was a rascal? There in the pigeon-hole was the blue envelope. What was her duty?
Pulling on her calico parka, she went for a stroll on the beach. The cool, damp air of Arctic twilight by the sea was balm to her troubled brain. She came back to the cabin with a deep-seated conviction that she was right.
She was not given many days to decide whether she should take the letter with her or leave it. A sudden gale from the south sent the ice-floes rushing through the Straits. They hastened away to seas unknown, not to return for months. The little mail steamer came hooting its way around the Point. It brought a letter of the utmost importance to Marian.
While in Nome the summer before she had made some hasty sketches of the Chukches, natives of the Arctic coast of Siberia, while they camped on the beach there on a trading voyage in a thirty-foot skin-boat. These sketches had come to the notice of the ethnological society. They now wrote to her, asking that she spend a summer on the Arctic coast of Siberia, making sketches of these natives, who so like the Eskimos are yet so unlike them in many ways. The pay, they assured her, would be ample; in fact, the figures fairly staggered her. Should she complete this task in safety and to the satisfaction of the society, she would then be prepared to pay her way through a three years' course in the best art school of America. This had long been a cherished dream. Marian's eyes shone with happiness.
When she had read the letter through, she went for a five-mile walk down the beach.
Upon returning she burst in on her companion.
"Lucile," she exclaimed, "how would you like to spend the summer in
Siberia?"
"Fine! Salt mine, I suppose," laughed Lucile. "But I thought all political prisoners had been released by the new Russian government?"