Yet not all is to be read upon the surface, even when one is so unskilled at dissembling as Edith Morrison. We may see signs, but we may not always translate their meaning. Her love affair had been one of long standing, begun when Robin had guided his first party over Marcy to the Lodge, then just built--herself a girl of less than a dozen years, trying to take a dead mother's place. How many times since then he had passed to and fro, with tourists in summer and hunting parties in winter. Often during fierce storms he had stayed at the Lodge for a week or more--gathered with her father and herself before the great log fire in the hall while the winds howled and the drifts banked up against the windows, gleaning from the Lodge library a knowledge of such things as books can teach--history, science and the outside world. Then had come the time when he had decided on a profession, when, with his hoarded earnings and such employment as he could find in the college town, he had begun his course in a school of engineering. The mountain winters without Robin had been lonely ones, but with her father she had devoted them to study, that she might not be left behind, and had taken the little school at last on the North Elba road in order to feel something of the independence which Robin knew. In this, the last summer of his mountain life, he had come to her father as chief guide, mainly that they might have more opportunity to perfect their plans for the years ahead. All the trails carried their story, and though young men still fell in love with Edith Morrison and maids with Robin Farnham, no moment of distrust had ever entered in.