She sat there in the chair he had made, by the hearth he had reared, in the room he had built--and the work had been that of a good craftsman because they had compelled him to learn in the penitentiary. Outside the winds were screaming about the roof-slabs he had nailed down. She was so close that he could put out his hand and touch her--and because now he wanted her beyond everything, even beyond the life of the man who had ruined his life, it was terribly clear that she could never be close to him except in such physical proximity as that of this moment. The ex-convict was not accustomed to thought. In its stead, he had substituted brooding. Thought is hard and tinged with torture for the brain that has not been reflective. Yet now he must think. Minerva had been to the college. She yearned for even a greater degree of education. He had built this room because he understood how she shrank from the squalid and unclean life of the mountain cabin--and in all the mountains was no more squalid creature than himself. She despised the idea of blood-reprisal, and to forego that would, by his standards, mean a baser surrender than for a priest to repudiate his cloth. He was ignorant, penniless, vindictive. She was, to his thinking, learned, fastidious and pledged to the new "fotched-on" order. Should he tell her that he loved her, provided he could imagine his stoic lips shaping such phrases, she could only be offended and distressed. He must not tell her. That one thing seemed certain, and, as he stood there, masking the storm in his thin breast under a scowling visage of tightly compressed lips and drawn brow, he was being racked by a yearning greater than he had ever known or imagined. How long he remained rigid and silent he did not know, but at last he heard her voice, speaking very softly: "Newty, you have been very good to me. You did all this for me--and yet even you don't know how much it means to me." "Hit warn't nothin'," he answered in a dead voice. Then, having resolved not to betray himself, he found himself crying out to his own surprise, in a tumult of fierce and passionate feeling: "I'd go plumb down inter hell, fer ye, M'nervy." The girl looked up, then she rose unsteadily, and laid a hand on his arm. Her eyes were gazing very fixedly into his, and she spoke eagerly: "You say you'd do that--for me. Do something else, Newty. Come--out of a life that's not much better than hell--for me." He spoke quietly again, though under her finger-touch his arm shook as if it were suddenly palsied: "I don't jest plumb understand ye." "Give it all up, Newty." She was talking excitedly, and her words came fast. "Give up this idea of vengeance. It's all wrong and mistaken--and wicked. It hurts you most of all. You said out there to-night that this was the only life you ever knew--" "This an' ther penitenshery," he corrected her; and a harsh note stole into the words as he uttered them.