fined for days together in this little cabin, and in this enforced
intimacy Peggy was sure to discover his secret and his adoration.

The little hovel was filled with the golden light of the blazing fagots,
and through the open door Alice could see the feathery crystals falling
in a wondrous, glittering curtain across the night. The stream roared in
subdued voice as though oppressed by the snows, and the shadow of the
fugitive as he moved about the fire had a savage, primal significance
which awed the girl into silence.

He was very deft in camp work, and cooked their supper for them almost
as well as they could have done it themselves, but he refused to sit at
the table with Peggy. "I'll just naturally stick to my slicker, if you
don't mind. I'm wet and my hands are too grimy to eat with a lady."

Alice continued to talk to him, always with an under-current of meaning
which he easily read and adroitly answered. This care, this double
meaning, drew them ever closer in spirit, and the girl took an
unaccountable pleasure in it.

After supper he took his seat in the open doorway, and the girl in the
bunk looked upon him with softened glance. She had no fear of him now;
on the contrary, she mentally leaned upon him. Without him the night
would be a terror, the dawn an uncertainty. The brave self-reliance of
his spirit appeared in stronger light as she considered that for weeks
he had been camping alone, and that but for this accident to her he
would be facing this rayless wintry night in solitude.

He began again to question her. "I wish you'd tell me more about
yourself," he said, his dark eyes fixed upon her. "I can't understand
why any girl like you should come up here with a bunch of rock-sharps.
Are you tied up to the professor?"

If Peggy expected her patient to resent this question she must have been
surprised, for Alice merely smiled as if at the impertinence of a child.

Mrs. Adams replied: "I can tell you that she is--and a very fortunate
girl her friends think her."

He turned to her with unmoved face. "You mean he's got money, I reckon."

"Money and brains and good looks and a fine position."

"That's about the whole works, ain't it--leastwise he will have it all
when he gets you. A man like that doesn't deserve what he's got. He's a
chump. Do you suppose I'd go off and leave you alone in a hole like
this with a smashed leg? I'd never bring you into such a country, in the
first place. And I certainly w