final futility of all his effort. And at last, as if moved by
pity to ease his suffering a little, it brought him back vividly to the
green valley, the flowers and the blue skies of Cragg's Ridge--and Nada.

It was like a dream. At times he could scarcely assure himself that he
had actually lived those weeks and months of happiness down on the edge
of civilization; it seemed impossible that Nada had come like an Angel
into his life down there, and that she had loved him, even when he
confessed himself a fugitive from the law and had entreated him to take
her with him. He closed his eyes and that last roaring night of storm at
Cragg's Ridge was about him again. He was in the little old Missioner's
cabin, with thunder and lightning rending earth and sky outside and Nada
was in his arms, her lips against his, the piteous heartbreak of despair
in her eyes. Then he saw her--a moment later--a crumpled heap down
beside the chair, the disheveled glory of her hair hiding her white face
from him as he hesitated for a single instant before opening the door
and plunging out into the night.

With a cry he sprang up, dashing the vision from him, and threw fresh
fuel on the fire. And he cried out the same old thought to Peter.

"It would have been murder for us to bring her, Pied-Bot. It would have
been murder!"

He looked about him at the swirling chaos outside the rim of light made
by his fire and listened to the moaning of the wind over the treetops.
Beyond the circle of light the dry snow, which crunched like sand under
his feet, was lost in ghostly gloom. It was forty degrees below zero.
And he was glad, even with this sickness of despair in his heart, that
she was not a fugitive with him tonight.

Yet he built up a little make-believe world for himself as he sat with
a blanket hugged close about him, staring into the fire. In a hundred
different ways he saw her face, a will-o-the-wisp thing amid the flames;
an illusive, very girlish, almost childish face--yet always with the
light of a woman's soul shining in it. That was the miracle which
startled him at last. It seemed as if the fiction he built up in his
despair transformed itself subtly into fact and that her soul had come
to him from out of the southland and was speaking to him with eyes which
never changed or faltered in their adoration, their faith and their
courage. She seemed to come to him, to creep into his arms under the
folds of the blanket and he sensed the so