Daddy John gazed for a moment, then bent
till his cheek was almost against hers.

"Pick up your heart, Missy," he whispered. "He looks to me better."

CHAPTER IV

From the day of the good news Courant rallied. At first they hardly
dared to hope. Bella and Daddy John talked about it together and
wondered if it were only a pause in the progress of his ailment. But
Susan was confident, nursing her man with a high cheerfulness that
defied their anxious faces.

She had none of their fear of believing. She saw their doubts and
angrily scouted them. "Low will be all right soon," she said, in
answer to their gloomily observing looks. In her heart she called them
cowards, ready to join hands with death, not rise up and fight till the
final breath. Her resolute hope seemed to fill the cabin with light
and life. It transformed her haggardness, made her a beaming presence,
with eyes bright under tangled locks of hair, and lips that hummed
snatches of song. He was coming back to her like a child staggering to
its mother's outheld hands. While they were yet unconvinced "when Low
gets well" became a constant phrase on her tongue. She began to plan
again, filled their ears with speculations of the time when she and her
husband would move to the coast. They marveled at her, at the
dauntlessness of her spirit, at the desperate courage that made her
grip her happiness and wrench it back from the enemy.

They marveled more when they saw she had been right--Susan who had been
a child so short a time before, knowing more than they, wiser and
stronger in the wisdom and strength of her love.

There was a great day when Low crept out to the door and sat on the
bench in the sun with his wife beside him. To the prosperous passerby
they would have seemed a sorry pair--a skeleton man with uncertain feet
and powerless hands, a worn woman, ragged and unkempt. To them it was
the halcyon hour, the highest point of their mutual adventure. The
cabin was their palace, the soaked prospect a pleasance decked for
their delight. And from this rude and ravaged outlook their minds
reached forward in undefined and unrestricted visioning to all the
world that lay before them, which they would soon advance on and
together win.

Nature was with them in their growing gladness. The spring was coming.
The river began to fall, and Courant's eyes dwelt longingly on the
expanding line of mud that waited for his pick. April came with a
pr