The woman became more human, and less an
angel, of course, but that only made her more real, and allowed them to
become acquainted with her, to talk with her, and to love her more. There
was no thought of wrong--until the Englishman came; for the devotion of
these men who lived alone, and mostly wifeless, was a great passionless
love unhinting of sin, and Cummins and his wife accepted it, and added to
it when they could, and were the happiest pair in all that vast
Northland.
The first year brought great changes. The girl--she was scarce more than
budding into womanhood--fell happily into the ways of her new life. She
did nothing that was elementally unusual--nothing more than any pure
woman reared in the love of a God and home would have done. In her spare
hours she began to teach the half dozen wild little children about the
post, and every Sunday told them wonderful stories out of the Bible. She
ministered to the sick, for that was a part of her code of life.
Everywhere she carried her glad smile, her cheery greeting, her wistful
earnestness to brighten what seemed to her the sad and lonely lives of
these silent, worshipful men of the North. And she succeeded, not because
she was unlike other millions of her kind, but because of the difference
between the fortieth and the sixtieth degrees--the difference in the
viewpoint of men who fought themselves into moral shreds in the big game
of life and those who lived a thousand miles nearer to the dome of the
earth.
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