emote heads of other
tall mountains peeping over their shoulders, the two green dots of girls
on either side of a broken man, they took it all in, to the full, most
dramatically too--and felt as if they were in the pictures.

A surpassing moving picture reel, more telling than any they had ever
witnessed, in which--oh, queer double-headed feeling--they were both
actors and spectators!

But pain--pain left no atmosphere of unreality about it for the
suffering man, for the sufferer who monopolized both their soft
sweaters, while they shivered convulsively, until if it came to a beauty
contest between the two now, the old Man Killer, awarding the palm,
would not have made it dependent on a mere matter of eyelashes, but on
which little nose was the least blue bitten.

Pain released something in that sufferer too,--a fire that was not all
wild-fire! For suddenly he dragged Una's green sweater-roll from under
his head and thrust it towards her with an imperious: "Put it on,
child!"

"I shan't!" replied that child of luxury, as arbitrarily, slipping it
back under the pallid cheek, above which the stand of agony in the stony
eye told that the man was suffering almost to a point of delirium now.

"Who ever thought Una would be such a brick?" Pem nibbled the words
between her chattering teeth. "She's shivering--yes! and frightened and
trying to cry--but the brick in her won't allow it!"

There was no doubt that the uncle of her blood was a brick, too, for he
fought the groans reverberating behind his clenched teeth, like a bee in
a bottle, only breaking out now and again in a yearning prayer for the
coming of his son.

"If he were only here--here!" he moaned; it was evident that the
youthful daredevil who liked excitement, but "knew where to stop", was a
tower of strength to the less balanced father.

Pem was longing uncontrollably for his appearance, also--for the rower
whom she had robbed of his oars, while the sufferer seemed to find his
only relief in talking about him.

"My son and I have been in bad scrapes before among--mountains," he
panted, feverishly. "Once high up in the Canadian Rockies, we missed our
guide who had gone back for provisions. Bad plight then, but the boy
didn't 'cave'! He was only fifteen when he shot his bear in Arizona. He
loves the West. But the East's in his blood. Just went wild over these
Berkshire Hills, this spring, over his first sight of mayflowers! They
seemed more of a treasure th