One night, a cold, unseasonable one, Osmond was alone in the shack, his room unlighted save by the flaring wood. The cabin had a couch, two chairs, and a big table, this covered with books. There were books on the wall, and the loft above, where he slept when he was not in his neighboring tent, made a balcony, taking half the room. He was in his long chair stretched among the shadows, his face lighted intermittently from the fire. He was thinking deeply, his black brows drawn together, his nervous hands gripped on the elbows of the chair. There was a slight tap at the door. He did not heed it, being used to mice among the logs and birds twittering overhead. Then the door opened, and a lady came in. Osmond half rose from his chair, and leaning forward, looked at her. He knew her, and yet strangely he had no belief that she was real. It was Rose, a long cloak about her, the hood slipped back from her rich hair. Her face was flushed by the buffeting of the wind, and its moist sweetness tingled with health. It was apparent to him at once that, as he was looking at her in the firelight, she also had fixed his face in the gloom. She was smiling at him, and her eyes were kind. Then she spoke. "I came to see you, Mr. Osmond Grant." Osmond was now upon his feet. He drew a chair into the circle of light. "Let me take your cloak," he said. It seemed to him that no such exciting thing had ever happened. "No, no. It isn't wet." She tossed it on the bench by the door, and having put both hands to her hair with the reassuring touch that is pretty in women, she turned to him, a radiant creature smiling out of her black drapery. "But I'll sit down," she said. The next moment, he hardly knew how it was, they were there by the fire, and he had accepted her. She was beautiful and wonderful, a thing to be worshiped, and he lost not a minute in telling himself he worshiped her, and that he was going to do it while he was man and she was woman, or after his clay had lost its spirit. Osmond had very little time to think of his soul, because he worked all day in the open and slept hard at night; but it always seemed to him reasonable that he had one. Now it throbbed up, invincible, and he looked at the lady and wondered again at her. The lady was smiling at him. "I wanted to meet you," she said, in her soft, persuasive voice. "You don't come to the house any more." He answered her simply and calmly, with no token of his inward turmoil. "I haven't been there for some days." "Is it because I am there?" "Grannie hasn't needed me." "Is it because I am there?" Then he smiled at her, with a gleam of white teeth and lighted eyes. "I've been a little afraid of you," he owned. "Well, you're not now?" "No, I'm not now."