myself beside her.
I couldn't speak, from dead cold fear, now that I had saved her, of what
it would have been if I had not. For two gasping minutes we just lay
there.

Then Paulette said pantingly, "I'm so dreadfully sorry--I've been such a
trouble! But I couldn't do anything but come, and--I forgot you couldn't
want me!"

I sat up and saw her, sitting on a cold, bare, wind-swept rock that was
all the refuge I had to offer her. Half a mile farther on were food and
shelter in the Halfway shack--and it might as well have been in Heaven,
for with Macartney's men cached in it I naturally could not take her
there. Behind that, twenty-seven miles off, was Caraquet; but even a
girl with a trained body like Paulette's could never make twenty-seven
miles on top of all we'd done.

"It's no question of wanting you," I exclaimed angrily. "It is that I
don't know what to do. But want you--when do you suppose I haven't
wanted you, ever since the night I first saw you by Dudley's fire? What
do you suppose I'd ever have been in this game _for_, if I hadn't wanted
just you in all this world? My heart of hearts, don't you know I love
you?" I lost my head, or I never would have said it, for I saw her
flinch. That brought me back to myself in the snow and desolation round
us that stood for God's world as nothing else would have done. I burst
out in shame, "Oh, forgive me! I never meant to let that out. I know you
never cared a hang for me; that you were going to marry Dudley, if he
hadn't been killed!"

For one solid minute Paulette never opened her mouth. She sat like a
colored statue, with rose-crimson cheeks and gold-bronze hair, under the
white January sun. Her eyes were so dark in her face that they looked
like blue-black ink. "I--I never was engaged to Dudley," she gasped at
last, more as if it were jerked out of her than voluntarily. "I didn't
think it was any business of yours, but I never was. We--Dudley and
I--only said so, because it seemed the simplest way to manage Marcia,
when Dudley brought me here to get me out of that emerald business. He
was good to me, if ever a man was good to a girl he was only sorry for;
I can't forget that brought him to his death. I'm sick with sorrow for
him,--but I never was going to marry Dudley! He didn't even want me to.
He----Oh, _Nicky_!"

Because I couldn't stand it; I'd seen her eyes. I had both her hands in
mine, I think I was telling her over and over how I had always loved
her,