g back to her touch. Her heart
beating madly, she scarce knew why, her step at once eager and
hesitant, she stepped by him. And he, close behind her, laughed softly
at her little cry, the one moment amply repaying the man for six months
of labour.

Now she understood everything; now her heart stood still and then
throbbed with a wonderful joy. And she turned and threw her arms about
his neck, crying softly: "Wayne! It is home!"

For the darkness which she had expected in the cavern's deep interior
had fled before the softly brilliant light that bathed it rosily, that
came from she did not yet know where. She saw a deep throated
fireplace, built of big granite blocks, a monster log blazing and
roaring mightily in it, the flames leaping up the rock chimney, drawn
upward and back into the sloping passage where the draft of air had in
the old days carried away the smoke from her rude stove. And she
guessed who had made the fireplace, piling stone on stone.

She saw a table, rustic, heavy, with legs of twisted cedar branches,
with books upon it, with a vase made of a hollowed out, gnarled limb
and choked with its great armful of valley flowers. She saw a chair
that patient, loving hands had made from what the winter-locked forest
had provided, seat and back covered with deerskin cushions, a chair
that opened its arms to her as though, still keeping its identity as a
part of her woodland, it were welcoming her to a world where love's
heart beat close to nature's. She saw that the hard floor had
disappeared under freshly strewn pine needles and under the two big
bear skin rugs which sprawled mightily before the table and before the
fireplace. She saw another chair, Wayne's chair it was going to be,
because it was such a monster.

She could only gasp as her dancing eyes tried to see everything at
once--flowers everywhere, hiding the walls, breathing perfume from the
corners, drooping from the ceiling.

"But the light!" she cried, wonderingly. "It is like day."

Then at last she saw how everywhere in the high ceiling he had
chiselled out deep inverted bowls, and in each cup-like cavity nothing
in the world other than a glowing electric bulb was shining, flooding
the room with a soft glow.

"And you did all of this yourself? While you were alone here in the
winter?"

His eyes were like hers, his own face flushed with the happiness of the
hour.

"I didn't make the bulbs," he laughed. "It's taken me a week p