By ETHEL WATTS MUMFORD
From Pictorial Review
"Your name!--Votre nom?" Crossman added, for in the North Country not many of the
habitants are bilingual.
She looked at him and smiled slowly, her teeth white against cardinal-flower lips.
"Ma name? Aurore," she answered in a voice as mystically slow as her smile, while the
mystery of her eyes changed and deepened.
Crossman watched her, fascinated. She was like no woman he had ever seen, radiating a
personality individual and strange. "Aurore," he repeated. "You're not the dawn, you
know; not a bit like it." He did not expect her to own to any knowledge of the legend of
her name, but she nodded her head understandingly.
"It was the Curé name' me so," she explained. "But the Curé and me," she shrugged,
"never could--how you say?--see--hear--one the other--so, I would not be a blonde just
for spite to him--I am a very black dawn, n'est-ce pas?"
"A black dawn," he repeated. Her words unleashed his fancy--her heavy brows and
lashes, her satiny raven hair, her slow voice that seemed made of silence, her eyes that
changed in expression so rapidly that they dizzied one with a sense of space. "Black
Dawn!" He stared at her long, which in no wise disconcerted her.
"Will you want, then, Antoine and me?" she asked at length.
He woke from his dream with a savage realization that, most surely, he wanted her. "Yes.
Of course--you--and Antoine. Wait, attendez, don't go yet."
"Why not?" she smiled. "I have what I came for."
Her hand was on the door-latch. The radiance from the opened door of the square, old-
fashioned stove shimmered over her fur cap and intensified the broad scarlet stripes of
her mackinaw. In black corduroy trousers, full and bagging as a moujik's, she stood at
ease, her feet small and dainty even in the heavy caribou-hide boots.
"Bon soir, monsieur," she said. "In two days we go with you to camp--me--and Antoine."
"Wait!" he cried, but she had opened the door. He rose with a start, and, ignoring the
intense cold, followed her till the stinging breath of the North stabbed him with the
recollection of its immutable power. All about him the night was radiant. Of a sudden the
