"I shall be quite comfortable there, and this shall be your room exclusively except when you bid me enter, as when I bring you your meals; otherwise I shall hold it inviolate." "But," said the woman, "there must be an equal division of labor, I must do my share." "There isn't much to do in the winter, except to take care of the burros, keep up the fire and prepare what we have to eat." "I am afraid I should be unequal to outdoor work, but in the rest I must do my part." He recognized at once that idleness would be irksome. "So you shall," he assented heartily, "when your foot is well enough to make you an efficient member of our little society." "Thank you, and now--" "Is there anything else before I get supper?" "You think there is no hope of their searching for me here?" The man shook his head. "If James Armstrong had been in the party," she said reflectively, "I am sure he would never have given up." "And who is James Armstrong, may I ask?" burst forth the other bluntly. "Why he--I--he is a friend of my uncle's and an--acquaintance of my own." "Oh," said the man shortly and gloomily, as he turned away. Enid Maitland had been very brave in his presence, but when he went out she put her head down on her arms on the table and cried softly to herself. Was ever a woman in such a predicament, thrown into the arms of a man who had established every conceivable claim upon her gratitude, forced to live with him shut up in a two-room log cabin upon a lonely mountain range, surrounded by lofty and inaccessible peaks, pierced by terrific gorges soon to be impassable from the snows? She had read many stories of castaways from Charles Reade's famous "Foul Play" down to more modern instances, but in those cases there had always been an island comparatively large over which to range, with privacy, seclusion, opportunity for withdrawal; bright heavens, balmy breezes, idyllic conditions. Here were two uplifted from the earth upon a sky-piercing mountain; they would have had more range of action and more liberty of motion if they had been upon a derelict in the ocean. And she realized at the same time that in all those stories the two castaways always loved each other. Would it be so with them? Was it so! And again the hot flame within outvied the fire on the hearth as the blood rushed to the smooth surface of her cheek again. What would her father say if he could know her position, what would the world say, and above all what would Armstrong say? It cannot be denied that her thoughts were terribly and overwhelmingly dismayed, and yet that despair was not without a certain relief. No man had ever so interested her as this one. What was the mystery of his life, why was he there, what had he meant when he had blessed the idle impulse that had sent her into his arms?