Her face shocked them into an understanding of the gravity of the accident. It was swept clean of its dauntless, rosy youth, had stiffened into an unelastic skin surface, taut over rigid muscles. But her eyes were loopholes through which anguish escaped. Bending them on her father a hungry solicitude suffused them, too all-pervading to be denied exit. Turned to the men an agonized questioning took its place. It spoke to them like a cry, a cry of weakness, a cry for succor. It was the first admission of their strength she had ever made, the first look upon them which had said, "You are men, I am a woman. Help me." They carried the doctor to the banks of the stream and laid him on a spread robe. He protested that it was nothing, it had happened before, several times. Missy would remember it, last winter in Rochester? Her answering smile was pitiable, a grimace of the lips that went no farther. She felt its failure and turned away plucking at a weed near her. Courant saw the trembling of her hand and the swallowing movement of her throat, bared of its sheltering kerchief. She glanced up with a stealthy side look, fearful that her moment of weakness was spied upon, and saw him, the pity surging from his heart shining on his face like a softening light. She shrank from it, and, as he made an involuntary step toward her, warned him off with a quick gesture. He turned to the camp and set furiously to work, his hands shaking as he drove in the picket pins, his throat dry. He did not dare to look at her again. The desire to snatch her in his arms, to hold her close till he crushed her in a passion of protecting tenderness, made him fear to look at her, to hear her voice, to let the air of her moving body touch him.