Part 6 (2/2)

And yet, as she spoke her heart was full of s 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, daht 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 froh the Straits They hastened away to seas unknown, not to return forits 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 cae in a thirty-foot skin-boat These sketches had coical society They norote to her, asking that she spend a su sketches of these natives, who so like the Eskimos are yet so unlike them in many ways The pay, they assured her, would be aered 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 A been a cherished dream

Marian's eyes shone with happiness

When she had read the letter through, she went for a five- she burst in on her companion

”Lucile,” she exclaimed, ”hoould you like to spend the suhed Lucile ”But I thought all political prisoners had been released by the new Russian govern,” said Marian

”Explain then”

Marian did explain At the end of her explanation Lucile agreed to go as Marian's traveling companion and tent-keeper In teeks her school ould be finished It would be a strange, a delightful su after they should have been asleep they were stillplans for this, their o over?” exclaimed Lucile suddenly

”Gasoline schooner, I suppose”

”I'd hate to trust any htfully

Lucile considered a moment

”Native skin-boat, then”

”That would be rather thrilling--to cross from the neorld into the old in a skin-boat”

”And safe enough too,” said Marian ”Did you ever hear of a native boat being lost at sea?”

”One But that one turned up at King's Island, a hundred and fifty uess we could risk it”

”All right, let's go”

Marian sprang to her feet, threw back the blankets to her couch, and fifteenskin-boat on a wild sea of walrus e white bears

Her wild dreams did not come true When the time came to cross the thirty-five miles of water which separates the Old World from the New, they sailed and paddled over a sea as placid as a mill-pond Here a brown seal bobbed his head out of the water; here a spectacled eiderduck rode up and down on the tiny waves, and here a great mass of tubular seaweed drifted by to remind them that they were really on the bosoe caused theue unrest