I

lost all recollection of how she looked in a town. The memory somehow

evaporated. This slim creature before me, flitting to and fro with the

grace of the woodland life, swift, supple, adroit, on her knees blowing

the fire, or stirring the frying-pan through a veil of smoke, suddenly

seemed the only way I had ever really seen her. Here she was at home;

in London she became some one concealed by clothes, an artificial doll

overdressed and moving by clockwork, only a portion of her alive. Here

she was alive all over.

I forget altogether how she was dressed, just as I

forget how any particular tree was dressed, or how the markings ran on

any one of the boulders that lay about the Camp. She looked just as

wild and natural and untamed as everything else that went to make up

the scene, and more than that I cannot say.

Pretty, she was decidedly not. She was thin, skinny,

dark-haired, and possessed of great physical strength in the form of

endurance. She had, too, something of the force and vigorous purpose of

a man, tempestuous sometimes and wild to passionate, frightening her

mother, and puzzling her easy-going father with her storms of

waywardness, while at the same time she stirred his admiration by her

violence. A pagan of the pagans she was besides, and with some haunting

suggestion of old-world pagan beauty about her dark face and eyes.

Altogether an odd and difficult character, but with a generosity and

high courage that made her very lovable.

In town life she always seemed to me to feel

cramped, bored, a devil in a cage, in her eyes a hunted expression as

though any moment she dreaded to be caught. But up in these spacious

solitudes all this disappeared. Away from the limitations that plagued

and stung her, she would show at her best, and as I watched her moving

about the Camp I repeatedly found myself thinking of a wild creature

that had just obtained its freedom and was trying its muscles.

Peter Sangree, of course, at once went down before

her. But she was so obviously beyond his reach, and besides so well

able to take care of herself, that I think her parents gave the matter

but little thought, and he himself worshipped at a respectful distance,

keeping admirable control of his passion in all respects save one; for

at his age the eyes are difficult to master, and the yearning, almost

the devouring, expression often visible in them was probably there

unknown even to himself. He, better than any one else, understood that

he had fallen in love with something most hard of attainment, something

that drew him to the very edge of life, and almost beyond it. It, no

doubt, was a secret and terrible joy to him, this passionate worship

from afar; only I think he suffered more than any one guessed, and that

his want of vitality was due in large measure to the constant stream of

unsatisfied yearning that poured for ever from his soul and body.

Moreover, it seemed to me, who now saw them for the first time

together, that there was an un-namable something—an elusive quality of

some kind—that marked them as belonging to the same world, and that

although the girl ignored him she was secretly, and perhaps unknown to

herself, drawn by some attribute very deep in her own nature to some

quality equally deep in his.

This, then, was the party when we first settled down

into our two months’ camp on the island in the Baltic Sea. Other

figures flitted from time to time across the scene, and sometimes one

reading man, sometimes another, came to join us and spend his four

hours a day in the clergyman’s tent, but they came for short periods

only, and they went without leaving much trace in my memory, and

certainly they played no important part in what subsequently happened.

The weather favoured us that night, so that by

sunset the tents were up, the boats unloaded, a store of wood collected

and chopped into lengths, and the candle-lanterns hung round ready for

lighting on the trees. Sangree, too, had picked deep mattresses of

balsam boughs for the women’s beds, and had cleared little paths of

brushwood from their tents to the central fireplace. All was prepared

for bad weather. It was a cosy supper and a well-cooked one that we sat

down to and ate under the stars, and, according to the clergyman, the

only meal fit to eat we had seen since we left London a week before.

The deep stillness, after that roar of steamers,

trains, and tourists, held something that thrilled, for as we lay round

the fire there was no sound but the faint sighing of the pines and the

soft lapping of the waves along the shore and against the sides of the

boat in the lagoon. The ghostly outline of her white sails was just

visible through the trees, idly rocking to and fro in her calm

anchorage, her sheets flapping gently against the mast. Beyond lay the

dim blue shapes of other islands floating in the night, and from all

the great spaces about us came the murmur of the sea and the soft

breathing of great woods. The odours of the wilderness—smells of wind

and earth, of trees and water, clean, vigorous, and mighty—were the

true odours of a virgin world unspoilt by men, more penetrating and

more subtly intoxicating than any other perfume in the whole world.

Oh!—and dangerously strong, too, no doubt, for some natures!

“Ahhh!” breathed out the clergyman after supper,

with an indescribable gesture of satisfaction and relief. “Here there

is freedom, and room for body and mind to turn in. Here one can work

and rest and play. Here one can be alive and absorb something of the

earth-forces that never get within touching distance in the cities. By

George, I shall make a permanent camp here and come when it is time to

die!”

The good man was merely giving vent to his delight

at being under canvas. He said the same thing every year, and he said

it often. But it more or less expressed the superficial feelings of us

all.