If only there were some way of getting quick news of Hugh! Why had Bella and he let this thing happen? Why had they stood helplessly by and allowed the rash fool to go singing to his own destruction? They might have held him by force, if not by argument, long enough to bring him to his senses. They had been weak; they were always weak before Hugh’s magnetic strength--always the audience, the following; Bella, for all her devastating tongue, no less than himself. And Hugh’s liberty, perhaps his life, might be the price of their acquiescence. Straining forward in his chair, listening, there came to Pete, across the silence, the sound of skis. He rose and hopped to the door, flinging it wide. He could not see above the top of the drift which rose just beyond the roof to a height of nine or ten feet, but listening intently, he thought he recognized a familiar slight unevenness in the sliding of the skis. “Bella!” he shouted, his boy-voice ringing with relief. “Bella! Here’s Hugh. He’s come back.” Bella was instantly at his side. They stood waiting in the doorway. Against the violet sky darkening above the blue wall of snow, a bulky figure rose, blotting out the light. It half slid, half tumbled down upon them, clumsy and shapeless. “Let us in,” panted Hugh. “Let us in.” Slipping his feet from the straps of his skis, he staggered past them and they saw that he was carrying a woman in his arms. CHAPTER III “Shut the door,” Hugh whispered, and laid his burden down on a big black bear-hide near the stove. He knelt beside it. He had no eyes for anything else. Pete, hobbling to him, gazed curiously down, and Bella knelt opposite and drew away Hugh’s mackinaw coat, with which he had wrapped his trove. It was not a woman whom they looked down upon, but a girl, and very young--perhaps not yet seventeen--a girl with cropped dark curly hair and a face so wan and blue and at the same time so scorched by the snow-glare that its exquisiteness of feature was all the more marked. Hugh’s handkerchief was tied loosely across her eyes. “I heard her crying in the snow,” he said with ineffable tenderness; “crying like a little bleating lamb with cold and pain and hunger and fright--the most pitiful thing in God’s cruel trap of life. She’s blind--snow-blind.” Pete gave a sharp exclamation, and Bella gently removed the handkerchief. The small figure moaned and moved its head. The lids of her eyes were swollen and discolored. “Snow-blind,” echoed Bella. “A bad case,” said Hugh. “Get her some soup, Bella, and--perhaps, hot water--I don’t know.” He looked up helplessly. Bella went to the kitchen. She had regained her old look of dumbness. Beside the figure on the floor Pete touched one of the girl’s small clenched hands. It was like ice. At the touch she moaned, and Hugh ordered sharply: “Let her alone.” So the boy dragged himself up again and stood by the mantel, watching Hugh with puzzled and wondering eyes.