He presently opened his eyes, and a smile came almost instantaneously to his face as he realised that his head was resting in Isabel’s lap, that he was muffled up in her shawl, and that she was looking down upon him anxiously, tenderly. A second sufficed to bring the whole thing to his mind, or at least the facts that he had gone under with the logs and by some agency had been landed here safe and comfortable, if not dry--and to bring also the instinctive idea that it would be the intelligent part to lie still, and be petted and sympathised with. Isabel scarcely returned his smile. She had not recovered from her fright. “Oh, Seth,” she asked earnestly, “Are you hurt? Do you feel any pain?” “Not a bit” he replied--“only dizzy like. By George! How they did come down though. I must have had a pretty narrow squeak of it. Funny--I don’t remember coming out at all.” She smiled now. “I should think not. You lay perfectly senseless way out there among the logs. We fished you out, and dragged you up here. I feel like a heroine in a Crusader’s romance, really!” It entered Seth’s mind to say something nice in reply, that she looked like one, or that they were not equal in those benighted ages to producing such women, or something of that sort; but his tongue did not seem to frame the words easily and as he looked up at her he grew shy once again, and felt himself flushing under her smile, and only said vacuously, “Mightly lucky I wasn’t alone, isn’t it?” Annie appeared on the scene now, her clothes steaming from the heat of the fire, over which she had endeavoured to dry them, and her teeth displaying a spasmodic tendency to knock together between sentences. She too was full of solicitude as to Seth’s condition, and to satisfy this he reluctantly sat up, stretched his arms out, felt of the bump on his forehead, beat his chest, and finally stood erect. “I’m all right, you see” he said--“only, bo-o-o, I’m cold,” and he made for the fire, upon which Annie had heaped brushwood, which crackled and snapped now, giving forth a furious heat. They stood about the fire for a considerable time. Isabel was opposite Seth, rather ostentatiously drying sundry damp places in her dress which had come in contact with the rescued man’s dripping hair and clothes. He was so interested in watching her, and in thinking half-regret fully, half-jubilantly, that she had been put to this discomfort in saving his life, that he failed to notice how completely drenched his cousin had been. The conversation turned entirely, of course, upon the recent great event, but it was desultory and broken by long intervals of silence, and somehow Seth did not get any clear idea of how he was saved, much less of the parts the two women had respectively played in the rescue.