“Father! father! help me! save me!” The young man started back, clutched his head with both hands, and looked about in a wild and frightened way. “What was that?” he breathlessly asked. “Did you hear? The wolves are coming down. That was the howl of the she-wolf!” In a dazed manner he found his way to the back door, opened it, passed out, and bolted it behind him. CHAPTER NINE MORE extracts from the lady’s journal: “I can never begin an entry in my journal without having that frightful scene come between me and these pages. Oh, it was terrible,--terrible beyond all comprehension! I cannot believe, after thinking it over and over during these weeks that have passed since it occurred, that it was the fear of death that so terrified me, and, I know, made an old woman of me. No, it could not have been that. It was the fear of going with that awful condemnation upon me. Was it just? Was it true? “He seems to have recovered at last from the alarming depression that followed his outbreak, and this gives me leisure to think, leisure to recall many circumstances that in my blindness, my incredible blindness and stupidity, I had overlooked. I take into account the fearful strain under which he had suffered so long. He is a delicate, finely organized man, and has had more to do and to bear than a dozen strong men would have done and borne so well and patiently. “There was his anxiety on the score of my recovery. Then there were the endless duties of waiting on me, of thinking of the thousands of little things that had to be thought of and done, and that he never forgot nor neglected. He has done my cooking, my washing,--everything that was hard and distasteful for a man to do. Then there was his constant anxiety on account of the snow; and it has been growing daily all through the winter with the increasing dangers and discomforts; and besides his anxiety was the hard physical labor--far too heavy for him--that he has been compelled to do in order to keep our hut from being buried and ourselves from being smothered. And, last, there has been the constant wearing upon him of a close imprisonment with me, for whom I know he now must have a most intense dislike.