his agony, when honor and
pride and self-respect were being reduced to ashes, he did not fail to
realize that to cry out, to rave or curse or denunciate, would only be
to add something cowardly and contemptible to the sum of his disgrace.
He did not even cast a stealthy glance toward his revolver, where it
lay in a niche in the cavern wall, though Marion was out in the snow
somewhere, and could not have stopped him if he had crawled to seize
it. That, too, would have been an act of cowardice and of infamy; and
something deep within him now continually spoke for her, and for
whatever it was she stood for in this chaos that was the end of all.

His fury slowly passed, and he had but emerged from its strangely
purifying fire into a calm that was well-nigh as terrible, when she
entered sobbing into the cave to tell him the pitiable little lie that
all her visible distress was for a pony to whom she had said farewell.
He saw her presently totter forward to put more fuel on the fire and
begin to prepare their evening meal. With eyes from which the smoke of
passion had now lifted, he saw what he had only vaguely seen before:
that she was thin and haggard; that her pale face took on a hectic
flush in the glow of the blazing pine; that her clothes were all in
tatters, her riding-skirt slit in many places, her coat and flannel
waist so worn, and torn that they barely covered her, and did indeed
reveal one white shoulder through a gaping rent; that one dilapidated
boot was quite out at toe; and that she was ill and faint and silent.

"Marion!" he called to her.

"Yes, Philip!" she answered, turning to look at him.

"Come here, please!"

She came and stood before him, unsteadily.

"Let me see your hands!"

She knelt, and held them out to him. Taking them in his own hands,
which were then far softer and whiter than hers, he looked long at the
raw and bleeding cracks, at the swollen joints, at the bruised and
calloused fingers, at the nails (they were once so pink and polished)
worn down to the quick, and at one nail that had been split back
almost to its root.

"They're not very pretty, are they?" she said, with a weak little
laugh that ended in a quiver of her chin.

He lifted the hands, the right one and then the left, and touched them
with his lips. She was very weary and faint and miserable; and he had
never done anything like that before; and so she drew back her hands,
and buried her face in them, and sank sobbing o