He watched her, standing by her bed. After all, sleep was the best thing for her--to knit her torn nerves and mend her tired body. Besides, the wilderness night was falling. He could see it already, gray against the window pane. The first day of their exile was gone. "I'll be all right in the morning," she told him sleepily. "And maybe it's for the best--after all. At least--it gives you a better chance to find Harold--and bring him back to me." Bill nodded, but he didn't trust himself to speak. IX There is a certain capacity in young and sturdy human beings for accepting the inevitable. When Virginia wakened the next morning, her physical distress was largely past and she was in a much better frame of mind. She pulled herself together, stiffened her young spine, and prepared to make the best of a deplorable situation. She had come up here to find her lost beloved, and she wasn't defeated yet. This very development might bring success. She realized that the fact that she had thus found a measure of compensation for the disaster would have been largely unintelligible to most of the girls of her class,--the girls she knew in the circle in which she had moved. It was not the accustomed thing to remain faithful to a fiance who had been silent an missing for six years, or to seek him in the dreary spaces of the North. The matter got down to the simple fact that these girls were of a different breed. Culture and sophistication and caste had never destroyed an intensity and depths of elemental passion that might have been native to these very wildernesses in which she was imprisoned. Cool an self-restrained to the finger tips, she knew the full meaning of fidelity. Orphaned almost in babyhood, she had lived a lonely life: this girlhood love affair of hers had been her single, great adventure. She had been sure that her lover still lived when all her friends had judged him dead. Months and years she had dreamed of finding him, of sheltering again in his arms, and proving to all the world that her faith was justified. Bill was already up, and the room warmed from the fire. The noise of his ax blows had wakened her. And she took advantage of his absence to dress. "You up?" he cried in delight when she entered. His arms were heaped with wood. "I'm not sure that you hadn't ought to rest another day. How do you feel?" "As good as ever, as far as I can tell. And pretty well ashamed of being such a baby yesterday." But his smile told her that he held no resentment. "I trust you'll be able to eat to-day?" "Eat? Bill, I am famished. But first"--and her face grew instantly sober--"I want to know just how we stand, and what our chances are. I remember what you told me yesterday about getting out. But we can't live here on nothing. What about supplies?"