pass someway. And I promise this." He paused, and
his face was gray as ashes. "I won't impose--any more of my company
upon you--than you wish."

The response was instantaneous. The girl's heart warmed; then she
flashed him a smile of sympathy and understanding. "Forgive me," she
said. "I'll try to be brave. I'll try to stiffen up. I know you'll do
everything you can to get me out. You're so good to me--so kind. And
now--I only want to go to sleep."

He watched her, standing by her bed. After all, sleep was the best
thing for her--to knit her torn nerves and mend her tired body.
Besides, the wilderness night was falling. He could see it already,
gray against the window pane. The first day of their exile was gone.

"I'll be all right in the morning," she told him sleepily. "And maybe
it's for the best--after all. At least--it gives you a better
chance to find Harold--and bring him back to me."

Bill nodded, but he didn't trust himself to speak.

IX

There is a certain capacity in young and sturdy human beings for
accepting the inevitable. When Virginia wakened the next morning, her
physical distress was largely past and she was in a much better frame of
mind. She pulled herself together, stiffened her young spine, and
prepared to make the best of a deplorable situation. She had come up
here to find her lost beloved, and she wasn't defeated yet. This very
development might bring success.

She realized that the fact that she had thus found a measure of
compensation for the disaster would have been largely unintelligible to
most of the girls of her class,--the girls she knew in the circle in
which she had moved. It was not the accustomed thing to remain faithful
to a fiance who had been silent an missing for six years, or to seek him
in the dreary spaces of the North. The matter got down to the simple
fact that these girls were of a different breed. Culture and
sophistication and caste had never destroyed an intensity and depths of
elemental passion that might have been native to these very wildernesses
in which she was imprisoned. Cool an self-restrained to the finger
tips, she knew the full meaning of fidelity. Orphaned almost in
babyhood, she had lived a lonely life: this girlhood love affair of hers
had been her single, great adventure. She had been sure that her lover
still lived when all her friends had judged him dead. Months and years
she had dreamed of finding him, of sheltering