m, and the
sooner the better.

This problem and a fiercer one filled my mind, for my soul was as
storm-beset as the hut, whose planking shook under the gale's force. I
realized how incongruous my position was.

I had no status at all. I was accompanying a run-away wife back to her
father's home, perhaps to meet her husband there. And whether Leroux
held me in his present power or not, inexorably I was heading for his
own objective.

CHAPTER X

SNOW BLINDNESS

More madly now than ever I felt that fierce temptation. There she lay,
the one woman who had ever seriously come into my life, sleeping so
near to me that I could bend down and rest my hand on the inert form
over which the snow drifted so steadily.

I brushed it away. I brooded over her. Why had I ever brought her on
that journey? Would that I had kept her, with all her love and
gentleness, for my delight.

If I had taken her to Jamaica, where I had planned to go, instead of
engaging that mock-heroic odyssey--there, among palm trees, in an
eternal spring, there would have been no need that she should remember.

I looked down on her. Again the snow covered her.

It fell so inexorably. It was like Leroux. It was as tireless as he,
and as implacable as he. I brushed it away with frantic haste, and
still it drifted into the doorless hut.

A dreadful fear held me in its grip: what if she never awoke? Some
people died thus in the snow. I raised the sleigh robe, and saw that
the fur coat stirred softly as she breathed.

How gently she slept--as gently as she lived. How could her own have
abandoned her in her need?

At last, out of the wild passions that fought within me, decision was
born. I would go on, because she had bidden me. And I would be ready
for Leroux, and let him act as he saw fit. I loaded my pistols. I
could do no more than fight for Jacqueline, and with God be the issue.

And with that determination I grew calm. And I sat over the fire and
let my imagination stray toward some future when our troubles would be
in the past and we should be together.

"Paul!"

I must have been half asleep, for I came back to myself with a start
and sprang to my feet. Jacqueline had risen upon her knees; she flung
her arms out wildly, and suddenly she caught her breath and screamed,
and stood up, and ran uncertainly toward me, with hands that groped for
me.

She found me; I caught her, and she pushed me from her and shuddered
and