"Don't begin to talk about anything like that," she said, gently pushing him down on the chair by the hearth, "till you are warm again. Where have you been freezing yourself like this?"

She was busy lighting the lamp and setting her little old blackened coffee-pot over the flames. Stephen told her of his long lonely tramp by the river, and watched her with keen eager eyes as she made the coffee and poured him out a cup.

"Now drink it all quick," she said imperatively, handing him the boiling mixture, from which the steam came furiously.

"It's like the ordeal by fire," answered Stephen, meekly taking the cup.

With a heroic effort he swallowed three parts of it, and colour began to come back to his face.

Katrine observed this, and sat down contentedly on the floor in front of the ambitious fire, that seemed trying to leap up the chimney through the roof.

"Stephen," she said very slowly and gently after a minute, "it was selfish of me to ask you to leave your claims. I've been thinking of it all day. I won't do it, and I will come and help you work them."

Stephen felt the room whirl round him as he heard. Was he not in some rich, warm dream that would dissolve and leave him suddenly? His claims, those golden claims! and Katrine too--he seemed to see her dressed in gold, framed in gold, gold in her eyes and hair. Her movement, as she turned to look at him, brought him back to realities.

"Do you mean it?" he said, stooping over her and catching her hands almost roughly in his. She met his feverish eyes with a bright, tranquil smile. He looked at her keenly for an instant, and involuntarily an exclamation broke from his lips: "Katrine! it's too much happiness for any man!"

Perhaps the G.o.ds above, who eye jealously the lives of mortals, here made a note of this remark in their pocket-books.

Katrine knitted her brows angrily. "I don't think so," she said. "You had better hear what sort of girl I am."

Stephen turned pale, and leaned down over her as she sat on the hearth, her head against his knees. The cabin was full of the warm red firelight, that leaped over the walls and up to the rough blackened rafters above them. It glistened on the silky dark hair beneath his hand, and fell ruddily over the smooth oval face turned up to him.

Stephen looked down at her and felt content.

"No, no," he said hastily; "never mind anything in the past; we will efface it all; we make a fresh start from to-night." He would have stooped and silenced her with a kiss, but an arrogant look came over her pale face, and she pushed him back with her hand.

"No, I don't like that idea. We must have things cleared up and tidy before we marry. You must know the truth from me, and then you will know how to meet any one who comes to you with talk about me afterwards; and they may come, for I'm known in all the saloons of Dawson."

Stephen shuddered.

"If they keep to the truth about me, you must just accept it; if they tell lies, you'll just shoot them."

Again a cold thrill pa.s.sed through her lover. To talk of shooting--taking a human life--murder--as though it were no more than a snapping of the fingers! His mind flew on a sudden bound of remembrance back to the little school teacher in the village of Arden, who could not bear the sight of a rabbit's blood on the trap, and whose quiet days were spent between the village schoolroom and the village church; yet he knew he had never loved that little teacher as he loved Katrine, that she could never rouse him as this woman did whom he believed to be an epitome of evil, who, as she lay now in the firelight by his feet, reminded him of the emblem of sin that crept into man's Eden. Yet it was a pleasure--what pleasure to be near her, to touch that smooth skin! But what was this pleasure?--was it also evil? What was this pa.s.sion? His thoughts flew onward feverishly, and then Katrine's voice struck across them and brought him back to outer consciousness again.

"Listen," she was saying, "while I tell you all, and _then_ we can start afresh, as you say."

Stephen put his hand over his eyes, and waited in silence. He dreaded unspeakably what he thought he was going to hear, and with a man's moral cowardice would have deferred her confession, slurred over and tried to forget her wrong-doing, rather than hear and forgive it. They had changed places since he had asked her that morning in his cabin to confide in him.

"Well, to begin with," went on her clear, soft voice, "I drink--I like drinking. You think it wrong to drink anything but water; I like wine and spirits, anything that excites me, and I can drink with any man in town. But I have never been drunk, Stephen, you understand that. Then I like all kinds of gaiety, and like to spend all my time dancing and laughing, and what your friend Talbot calls 'fooling.' And I gamble,"

Katrine paused a second before she said the decisive words, and then went on rapidly, "oh, Stephen, you don't know, I haven't told you, but I love the tables. I can sit up all night and play with the boys; I love excitement, I love the winning and raking in the gold dust. I spend all my nights playing; it's what I live for in this awful place."

There was silence, then Katrine's voice broke it again--

"Now you think that so wicked, I bet you don't want to marry me now."

There was a half laugh with a sad ring in it as she looked up to his covered face. Now Stephen heard, but the words fell on his ears dully; he was waiting in strained painful tension for what was to come. It was true he loathed gambling as a hated vice, and but for the apprehension that gripped his mind her confession so far would have been horrible to him. Still it was as a Christian that he abhorred these things. What he expected to hear he would have abhorred as a man and a lover; and the former abhorrence is considerably milder than the latter.

"Go on," he said at last, in a stifled voice.

"There is nothing more," returned Katrine, dejectedly.

She thought she was being condemned and despised, and to none is that a cheering feeling. Stephen sat up suddenly, and then bent over, clasping his hands round her waist, lithe and supple even in her rough clothing, and drew her up to him.

"Is there nothing?" he whispered eagerly in her ear. "Have you nothing more to confess to me?"

Katrine gave herself up to his embrace, a delicious sense of peace and protection and warm comfort stealing over her such as she had never known.

"Nothing," she murmured, with her soft lips close to his ear and her silky curls touching his neck. She felt Stephen grasp her close to him, and a tremor ran through his whole frame.

"Have you never lain like this in a man's arms before? never felt a kiss on your lips?" he persisted, holding her to him with a fierce intensity of growing pa.s.sion.

"Never, never," Katrine answered, opening her calm dark eyes and looking straight up to his.

Stephen met their gaze for one long second, a proud, tranquil, fearless look that sunk deep into his soul and poured balm into every wound she had ever made there. The next moment she felt a torrent of hot kisses on her face, a pressure that almost stifled her on her breast, a murmur of "Darling, my darling," and knew nothing very clearly any more except that she was loved and very happy.

CHAPTER V

GOLD-PLATED

The next afternoon, when Stephen returned to the west gulch and Talbot heard his news, he said he was glad, and meant it. Life at the gulch was very desolate and dreary, and such a bright glad presence as the girl's would alleviate the monotony and disperse the gloom.

For the following week both men were busy preparing Stephen's cabin for her reception and trying to impart to it a bridal appearance. The hands were left to do the work on the claims, and Talbot and Stephen were too busy indoors to even oversee them. The cabin was large and well built.

It stood looking across the gulch, and half-way down it, over the tops of the dark green pines and facing towards the western horizon, where the pink lights played and the little sundogs gambolled in the fall of the short grey snowy afternoons. Stephen was down in town once in the week, and came back with his pony laden with mysterious packages, and when Talbot came in in the evening he found Stephen on his knees, tacking down strips of carpet by the bed in the inner room. Narrow curtains had also been nailed up beside the window, and altogether the cabin presented a luxurious appearance.

"This is quite magnificent," remarked Talbot, strolling about with an admiring air.

"D'ye think so?" replied Stephen in a pleased tone, lifting a flushed face from his tacks and sitting back on his boot heels. "She's awfully handsome, isn't she? Say, it's strange to come to a hole like this and meet the handsomest girl you've ever seen!"

"She is very handsome," a.s.sented Talbot, sitting down by the stove and stretching out his frozen feet before it. He was in the other room, but close to the open door leading into the bedroom, and facing Stephen as he sat on the floor with the screw of tacks by his side that had been paid for in gold.

"And good, too, eh? good at heart, don't you think? Only not exactly religious, of course," he continued.

"No, she's not very religious," returned Talbot, with the dry, hard tone in his voice that his subordinates knew and hated.

"But it's not every one who says, 'Lord, Lord, that shall enter the kingdom of heaven,'" quoted Stephen; "you remember, Christ said that,"

he pursued in an anxious tone, peering up at the other for encouragement.

Talbot gave his slight, quiet laugh.

"You've got the handsomest girl in the place," he said, "and a very nice, charming one, too. I don't see what more you want."

To his strong, determined character this perpetual straining after a religion that was cast to the winds first at the temptation of gold, and then at a saloon-keeper's daughter's smile, was rather contemptible.

"And 'there's more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth,' etc.,"

Stephen continued, anxious to persuade himself into a comfortable frame of mind.