She did not look back as she disappeared into it, and Philip turned like one in a dream and went to the summit of the bare rock ridge, from which he could look over the quiet surface of the lake and a hundred square miles of the unpeopled world which had now become so strangely his own.

An hour--a little more than that--had changed the course of his life as completely as the master-strokes of a painter might have changed the tones of a canvas epic.

It did not take reason or thought to impinge this fact upon him.

It was a knowledge that engulfed him overwhelmingly.

So short a time ago that even now he could not quite comprehend it all, he was alone out on the lake, thinking of the story of the First Woman that Jasper had told him down at Fond du Lac.