es which they had made at his
expense. Yes, and he had had a woman's ways from first to last.
Nothing that had happened had been able to coarsen him; he had never
given way to loose talk or brutal jests, and in the presence of
suffering had invariably been full of tenderness.

Good heavens! pass on to the crisis--to that day when he had come to
the top of the shaft and called down to him! He had answered his call,
praying him in an agonized voice to descend and rescue him. He could
see him now approaching hurriedly, yet cautiously, through the
darkness, lifting high up his swinging lamp so that its rays fell
across his face. He could still remember how absurd it had seemed to
suppose that a creature, so small and fragile, could save him from
_that other_. Yet he had; and after that, because of the relief he
felt, he had confessed. Then, in a moment of compassionate
self-forgetfulness, Mordaunt had placed his arms about him and had
drawn down his head upon his breast--an action of which no man in
dealing with another man was ever capable; the mother-instinct was
manifested there. In the flickering lamplight, with his head pressed
close to his companion's breast, feeling its rise and fall at each
struggling intake of the breath, crouching underground upon the
bed-rock, he had guessed the secret--_that Mordaunt was not a man_.
From that hour he had loved her. She had never known that he shared
her secret. Thank God, he had remained so much a gentleman that he had
not told her that! Who she was, why she had come to the Klondike, what
was her proper name, he had not permitted himself to inquire; for him
it had been sufficient that she was a woman, and that he loved her,
and that he was unworthy of her love. After she had seen him shoot at
Spurling he had avoided her, lest by contact with him she should be
defiled. He had vaguely hoped at the time of leaving that the day
might come, after he had cleansed himself and proved himself a man,
when he might seek her out and ask her to be his wife. Through the
last three years he had lived for that. To have asked her then would
have been an insult, an act of cowardice. How would an upright woman
answer a man whom she had just saved from homicide? How would she
regard a man who had discovered the secret of her sex in such a
manner, because of her compassion, and had not had the decency to keep
that knowledge secret even from herself? So he had fled from the
Shallows for a double rea