gs of his exiled youth. But there would be
no ski-running for several nights now. He was a prisoner, and at a time
when imprisonment was hard to bear.

If only there were some way of getting quick news of Hugh! Why had
Bella and he let this thing happen? Why had they stood helplessly by and
allowed the rash fool to go singing to his own destruction? They might
have held him by force, if not by argument, long enough to bring him
to his senses. They had been weak; they were always weak before Hugh's
magnetic strength--always the audience, the following; Bella, for
all her devastating tongue, no less than himself. And Hugh's liberty,
perhaps his life, might be the price of their acquiescence.

Straining forward in his chair, listening, there came to Pete, across
the silence, the sound of skis.

He rose and hopped to the door, flinging it wide. He could not see above
the top of the drift which rose just beyond the roof to a height of nine
or ten feet, but listening intently, he thought he recognized a familiar
slight unevenness in the sliding of the skis.

"Bella!" he shouted, his boy-voice ringing with relief. "Bella! Here's
Hugh. He's come back."

Bella was instantly at his side. They stood waiting in the doorway.
Against the violet sky darkening above the blue wall of snow, a bulky
figure rose, blotting out the light. It half slid, half tumbled down
upon them, clumsy and shapeless.

"Let us in," panted Hugh. "Let us in."

Slipping his feet from the straps of his skis, he staggered past them
and they saw that he was carrying a woman in his arms.

CHAPTER III

"Shut the door," Hugh whispered, and laid his burden down on a big
black bear-hide near the stove. He knelt beside it. He had no eyes for
anything else. Pete, hobbling to him, gazed curiously down, and Bella
knelt opposite and drew away Hugh's mackinaw coat, with which he had
wrapped his trove. It was not a woman whom they looked down upon, but
a girl, and very young--perhaps not yet seventeen--a girl with cropped
dark curly hair and a face so wan and blue and at the same time so
scorched by the snow-glare that its exquisiteness of feature was all the
more marked. Hugh's handkerchief was tied loosely across her eyes.

"I heard her crying in the snow," he said with ineffable tenderness;
"crying like a little bleating lamb with cold and pain and hunger
and fright--the most pitiful thing in God's cruel trap of life. She's
blind--snow-blind."

Pete