his own chair
away, seized Ruth about her waist as he did so, and so dragged her out
from under the avalanche.

It was all over in a moment, and the two stood, clinging to each other
involuntarily, while the dust of the fallen plaster spread around them.

For a moment Ruth Fielding had been in as perilous a situation as she had
ever experienced, and her life had been rather full of peril and
adventure since, as a girl of twelve, and in the first volume of this
series, we met her as "Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill."

At the time just mentioned, the orphaned Ruth had appeared at her
great-uncle's mill on the Lumano River, near Cheslow, in one of the New
England States, and had been taken in by the miserly old miller rather
under protest. But Aunt Alvirah Boggs, who was Uncle Jabez Potter's
housekeeper, had loved the child from the very beginning. And in truth
the old miller loved Ruth too, only he was slow to admit it.

Ruth's first young friends at the Red Mill were the Cameron twins, and
with Helen she had spent her schools days and many of her vacations, at
Briarwood Hall, in the North Woods, at the seashore, in the West, in the
South, Down East, and in other localities, the narrated adventures of
which are to be found in the several volumes of the Ruth Fielding Series.

In the book just preceding this present story, "Ruth Fielding in the
Great Northwest," Helen was likewise with Ruth when she made her famous
moving picture, "Brighteyes" in connection with the Alectrion Film
Corporation, the president of which, Mr. Hammond, had first encouraged
Ruth to turn her entire time and talent to the writing of moving picture
scenarios.

The fall before the time of this wedding party in which the girl of the
Red Mill was taking part, fortune threw in Ruth's way a charming young
woman, a full-blood Osage Indian, in whom Mr. Hammond saw possibilities
of development for screen acting. At least, to use the trite and
bombastic moving picture phrase, Wonota, the Indian princess,
"photographed like a million dollars."

The Great War's abrupt conclusion brought Tom Cameron home just as eager
as he had been for two years past to have Ruth agree to his plans for the
future. As Ruth saw it (no matter what may have been her secret feeling
for Tom) to do as Tom wished would utterly spoil the career on which she
had now entered so successfully.

Tom, like most young men in love, considered that a girl's only career
should be a husband