lock they met on the
parlor floor and Glover led her to the elevator, which was being run
that night by Solomon Battershawl. Solomon lifted them to the top
floor and made busy at the end of the hall while they had five short
minutes. When they descended he knew what she was facing. Even Marie,
the one friend he thought he had in the family, had taken a stand
against them, and her father was deaf to every appeal.

They parted, depressed, with only a hand pressure, a look and a whisper
of constancy. At midnight, as Glover lay thinking, a crew caller
rapped at his door. He brought a message and held his electric
pocket-lamp near, while Glover, without getting up, read the telegram.
It was from Bucks asking if he could take a rotary at once into the
Heart Mountains.

Glover knew snow had been falling steadily on the main line for two
days. East of the middle range it was nothing but extreme cold, west
it had been one long storm. Morris Blood was at Goose River. The
message was not an order; but on the division there was no one else
available at the moment that could handle safely such a battery of
engines as would be needed to bore the drifts west of the sheds.
Moreover, Glover knew how Bucks had chafed under the conditions that
kept the directors on his hands. They were impatient to get to the
coast, and the general manager was anxious to be rid of them as soon as
there should be some certainty of getting them safely over the
mountains.

Glover, on the back of the telegram, scrawled a note to Crosby, the
master-mechanic, and turned over not to sleep, but to think--and to
think, not of the work before him, but of her and of her situation. A
roundhouse caller roused him at half-past three with word that the snow
battery was marked up for four o'clock. He rose, dressed deliberately
and carefully for the exposure ahead, and sat down before a candle to
tell Gertrude, in a note, when he hoped to be back.

Locking his trunk when he had done, he snuffed out the candle and
closed his room door behind him. The hall was dark, but he knew its
turns, and the carpeted stairs gave no sound as he walked down. At the
second floor there were two stairways by which he could descend. He
looked up the dim corridor toward where she slept. Somehow he could
not make up his mind to leave without passing her room.

His heavy tread was noiseless, and at her door he paused and put his
hand uncertainly upon the casing. In the dar