Miss Newell sat perfectly still for a while; then she went to her room, and threw herself down on the bed, listening to an endless mental repetition of those words that the faithless night had brought to her ear. The moonlight had left the piazza, and crept round to the side of the house; it shone in at the window, touching the girl's cold fingers pressed to her burning cheeks and temples. She got up, drew the curtain, and groped her way back to the bed, where she lay for hours, trying to convince herself that her misery was out of all proportion to the cause, and that those coarse words could make no real difference in her life. They did make a little difference: they loosened the slight, indefinite threads of intercourse which a year had woven between these two exiles. Miss Newell was prepared to withdraw from any further overtures of friendship from the engineer; but he made it unnecessary for her to do so,--he made no overtures. On the night of Pratt's tipsy salutation he had abruptly decided that a mining camp was no place for a nice girl, with no acknowledged masculine protector. In Miss Newell's circumstances a girl must be left entirely alone, or exposed to the gossip of the camp. He knew very well which she would choose, and so he kept away,--though at considerable loss to himself, he felt. It made him cross to watch her pretty figure going up the trail every morning and to reflect that so much sweetness and refinement should not be having its ameliorating influence on his own barren and somewhat defiant existence. II. The autumn rains set in early, and the winter was unusually severe. Arnold had a purpose which kept him hard at work and very happy in those days.