e up in the middle of the night?"

"Yes."

"What wakened you?"

"Nash and Kilrain."

He sighed: "I wish I'd been here."

She answered: "I'll wash up; we'll eat; and then off on the trail. I've
an idea that the two will be back, and they'll have more men behind
them."

After a little her voice called from the outside: "Anthony, have you had
a look at the morning?"

He came obediently to the doorway. The sun had not yet risen, but the
fresh, rose-coloured light already swept around the horizon throwing
the hills in sharp relief and flushing, faraway, the pure snows of the
Little Brothers. And so blinding was the sheen of the lake that it
seemed at first as though the sun were about to break from the waters,
for there all the radiance of the sunrise was reflected, concentrated.

Looking in this manner from the doorway, with the water on either side
and straight ahead, and the dark, narrow point of land cutting that
colour like a prow, it seemed to Anthony almost as if he stood on the
bridge of a ship which in another moment would gather head and sail out
toward the sea of fresh beauty beyond the peaks, for the old house of
William Drew stood on a small peninsula, thrusting out into the lake, a
low, shelving shore, scattered with trees.

Where the little tongue of land joined the main shore the ground rose
abruptly into a shoulder of rocks inaccessible to a horse; the entrance
and exit to the house must be on either side of this shoulder hugging
closely the edge of the water.

Feeling that halo of the morning about them, for a moment Anthony forgot
all things in the lift and exhilaration of the keen air; and he accepted
the girl as a full and equal partner in his happiness, looking to her
for sympathy.

She knelt by the edge of the water, face and throat shining and wet, her
head bending back, her lips parted and smiling. It thrilled him as if
she were singing a silent song which made the brightness of the morning
and the colour beyond the peaks. He almost waited to see her throat
quiver--hear the high, sweet tone.

But a scent of telltale sharpness drew him a thousand leagues down and
made him whirl with a cry of dismay: "The bacon, Sally!"

It was hopelessly burned; some of it was even charred on the bottom of
the pan. Sally, returning on the run, took charge of the cookery and
went about it with a speed and ability that kept him silent; which being
the ideal mood for a spectator, he watched and found him