Dr. Gleason's Arctic trip, designed to cover a year of research and discovery, prolonged itself into three years and two months. Shipwrecks, thrilling escapes, months of silence, and a period when hope for the safety of the party was quite gone, all figured in the story before the heroic rescue brought a happier ending to what had come so near to being another tragedy of the ice-bound North. It was June when Frank Gleason, in the care of a nurse and a physician, arrived at his sister's summer cottage by the sea. For a month after his coming Frank Gleason was too ill to ask many questions. But with returning strength came an insistence upon an answer to a query he had already several times put to his sister. "Edith, what of the Denbys? Where is Helen? Why do you always evade any questions about her?" "She is here with me." "Here--_still_?" "Yes. And she's a great comfort and help to me." "And Burke doesn't know yet where she is?" "Not that we know of." "Impossible--all this time!" "Oh, I don't know. All our friends know her as 'Mrs. Darling.' The Denbys never come here, and they'd never think of looking here for her, anyway. We figured that out long ago." "But it can't go on forever! When is she going back?" An odd look crossed Mrs. Thayer's face. "I don't know, Frank; but not for some time--if ever--I should judge, from present indications." "'If ever'! Good Heavens, Edith, what do you mean?" demanded the doctor, pulling himself up in his chair. "I _knew_ no good would come of this tom-foolishness!" "There, there, dear, never mind all this now," begged his sister. "Please don't try to talk about it any more." "But I will talk about it, Edith. I want to know--and you might just as well tell me in the first place, and not hang back and hesitate," protested the doctor, with all the irritability of a naturally strong man who finds himself so unaccountably weak in his convalescence. "What's the trouble? Hasn't that--er--fool-improvement business worked out? Well, I didn't think it would!" Edith Thayer laughed softly. "On the contrary, it's working beautifully. Wait till you see her. She's a dear--a very charming woman. She's developed wonderfully. But along with it all has come to her a very deep and genuine, and rather curious, humility, together with a pride, the chief aim of which is to avoid anything like the position in which she found herself as the mortifying, distress-causing wife of Burke Denby." "Humph!" commented the doctor. "That Burke doesn't love her, she is thoroughly convinced. To go to him now, tacitly asking to be taken back, she feels to be impossible. She has no notion of going where she isn't wanted; and she feels very sure she _isn't_ wanted by either Burke or his father. Of course the longer it runs, and the longer she stays away, the harder it seems for her to make herself known."