he cake into quarters.

"It would be one of the biggest compliments you could pay me," she
said. "But won't you have some boiled tongue with it, a little canned
lobster, a pickle--"

"Pickles!" he interrupted. "Just cake and pickles--please! I've dreamed
of pickles up there. I've had 'em come to me at night as big as
mountains, and one night I dreamed of chasing a pickle with legs for
hours, and when at last I caught up with the thing it had turned into
an iceberg. Please let me have just pickles and cake!"

Behind the lightness of his words she saw the truth--the craving of
famine. Ashamed, he tried to hide it from her. He refused the third
huge piece of cake, but she reached over and placed it in his hand. She
insisted that he eat the last piece, and the last pickle in the bottle
she had opened.

When he finished, she said:

"Now--I know."

"What?"

"That you have spoken the truth, that you have come from a long time in
the North, and that I need not fear--what I did fear."

"And that fear? Tell me--"

She answered calmly, and in her eyes and the lines of her face came a
look of despair which she had almost hidden from him until now.

"I was thinking during those thirty minutes you away," she said. "And I
realized what folly it was in me to tell you as much as I have. Back
there, for just one insane moment, I thought that you might help me in
a situation which is as terrible as any you may have faced in your
months of Arctic night. But it is impossible. All that I can ask of you
now--all that I can demand of you to prove that you are the man you
said you were--is that you leave me, and never whisper a word into
another ear of our meeting. Will you promise that?"

"To promise that--would be lying," he said slowly, and his hand
unclenched and lay listlessly on his knee. "If there is a reason--some
good reason why I should leave you--then I will go."

"Then--you demand a reason?"

"To demand a reason would be--"

He hesitated, and she added:

"Unchivalrous."

"Yes--more than that," he replied softly. He bowed his head, and for a
moment she saw the tinge of gray in his blond hair, the droop of his
clean, strong shoulders, the SOMETHING of hopelessness in his gesture.
A new light flashed into her own face. She raised a hand, as if to
reach out to him, and dropped it as he looked up.

"Will you let me help you?" he asked.

She was not looking at him, but beyond him. In her face he saw again
the stra