vel
before you; and I am going back to-morrow, as I promised, to bring him
through.'

"She had nothing to say but rose and held out her hand. In a little while
I began to lead her down through the belt of spruce. I moved very slowly,
choosing steps, for she paid no attention to her footing. Her hand rested
limply in mine, and she stumbled, like one whose light has gone out in a
dark place."

Tisdale's story was finished, but Miss Armitage waited, listening. It was
as though in the silence she heard his unexpressed thoughts.

"But her life was wrecked," she said at last. "She never could forget.
Think of it! The terror of those weeks; the long-drawn suspense. She
should not have stayed in Alaska. She should have gone home at the
beginning. She was not able to help her husband. Her influence was lost."

"True," Tisdale answered slowly. "Long before that day I found her, she
must have known it was a losing fight. But the glory of the battle is not
always to the victor. And she blamed herself that she had not gone north
with her husband at the start. You see she loved him, and love with that
kind of woman means self-sacrifice; she counted it a privilege to have
been there, to have faced the worst with him, done what she could."

Miss Armitage straightened, lifting her head with that movement of a
flower shaken on its stem. "Every woman owes it to herself to keep her
self-respect," she said. "She owes it to her family--the past and future
generations of her race--to make the most of her life."

"And she made the most of hers," responded Tisdale quickly. "That was her
crowning year." He hesitated, then said quietly, with his upward look from
under slightly frowning brows: "And it was just that reason, the debt to
her race, that buoyed her all the way through. It controlled her there at
the glacier and gave her strength to turn back, when the setter refused to
come. Afterwards, in mid-winter, when news of the birth of her son came
down from Seward, I understood."

An emotion like a transparent shadow crossed his listener's face. "That
changes everything," she said. "But of course you returned the next day
with a horse to do as you promised, and afterwards helped her out to
civilization."

"I saw Louis Barbour buried, yes." Tisdale's glance traveled off again to
the distant Pass. "We chose a low mound, sheltered by a solitary spruce,
between the cabin and the creek, and I inscribed his name and the date on
the trunk of