They reached their tunnel and the cabin in good time; but soon afterward the dam broke, and the swirling, thundering mass of water bore it down the canon. This removed the support of the snow backed up between the river and the top of the cliff, and it went plunging down into the water, leaving the top of the hut exposed, and solving the problem of the prison of snow. CHAPTER TWELVE ONCE again from the lady’s journal: “It is impossible for me to describe the hope, peace, and comradeship that have transformed this place into a little nest, where it had been so terrible a prison before. The sunshine outside continues, and I know that it is but a matter of days when my father will come. It seems unaccountable to me that anything in the world could have stayed him so long; but Dr. Mal-bone assures me that the roads and mountains are still utterly impassable; that the roads, besides being strewn with fallen trees, are in places washed away, and that our one means of escape will be afoot, on our own account. We are now talking it over all the time, and are ready to start at the first favorable moment. My leg is nearly well; only a slight pain after severe exertion, and a most embarrassing weakness there, are the trouble now. But he is putting me through excellent treatment and training to overcome all that; and he has given me the joyous promise that we shall make the start in a week from to-day. “And now I must write of some other wonderful things that have happened. The change that has come in our mutual bearing and understanding is so incredible that I hardly dare put it down here, lest it prove a dream. I made a vow some time ago in this journal that I would make this man need me and want me. That victory is won. And I know that in winning it over him I have won it over myself. O God, how blind, how stupidly, sordidly blind, I have been all these years! In the depths of my wretched selfishness, in the dark caverns of my meanness, I had never dreamed of the real human heart throbbing and aching and hoping all about me; it has taken this strange man to drag me forth into the light. And not at all willingly or consciously has he done so. There is a sting in that. At times I hate him still when I think of it all. It was the silent, intangible, undirected force radiating from him that has wrought the change. I feel no humiliation in saying this. I say it and know it in spite of the great distance that separates us,--the social barriers that mean so little and do so much. It will remain with me forever, whatever happen, to have known a man; to have known him in his strength and weakness, in his splendid unselfishness and childish reliance; in his simplicity and complexity; in his singleness of purpose and variety of attributes; in his gentleness and ferocity, and, above all, in his wonderful sense of duty. But I wish he were moved by something besides duty.