“I can only crave her forgiveness for deceiving her both as to her father’s death and my being a physician.” The eager hope, the anxiety, the absorption of her entire self in the stricken man at her feet, fled before the crushing whirlwind of grief that now overwhelmed her. The loss of her father was the loss of the anchor of her life, the loss of the one sure thing upon which her soul rested, in which she knew peace, security, sympathy, and strength. She spoke no word, but gazed far down the canon, a picture of complete desolation. Dr. Malbone stood beside her, looking down thoughtfully into the face of his friend. The men, relieved from their work of bringing back a faint glow of the flickering life on the ground, moved away silently, with the instinctive delicacy of their kind, knowing that they were facing a tragedy that they did not understand. The letter fell from the young woman’s hand as she still gazed in mute agony down the canon. A slight swaying of her form warned Dr. Malbone that his time for action had arrived. “A noble life still is left to us,” he quietly said, without looking up, and with a certain unsteadiness in his voice; “and it appeals to us for all that we have to give of help and strength and sympathy.” It was a timely word. Instantly she dragged herself out of the crushing tumult into which she had been plunged. “Yes,” she said, radiant with love and towering above the wreck that encompassed her, “the noblest of all lives is still left to us, and it shall have all that lies in us to give.” “Then,” said Dr. Malbone, “time is very precious. Let us take him to my home at once.” The sun had set behind the western mountains, but it still tipped the snowy summit of Mount Shasta with a crimson glow. “Put the horses through,” said Dr. Malbone to the man who drove. They made good speed up the grade, Dr. Malbone pondering in silence some problem that still sorely troubled him, the young woman sitting on the floor of the wagon and holding the hand of the unconscious man. Presently they arrived at Dr. Malbone’s house, where his plain, homelike wife, a competent mountain woman, quickly had the patient comfortable in bed, while her husband went thoroughly into the treatment. His was a mercurial spirit, the opposite of the gentle soul now seemingly passing away under his hands. “I can find absolutely nothing,” he finally exclaimed, in despair, “except simple inanition as the probable cause and a complication of this attack, and I know that it is absurd. You must help me, madam. Tell me how you lived.”