She remembered now how she had tried to draw him into serious discussion of various topics that interested her, and should have interested him, and how persistently he had evaded them. He had been a student of the law, but even upon that topic she had been unable to draw a thoughtful word from him. Light-hearted, boyish, shallow-minded, care-free he had always been, with never a thought for the morrow, his distant future, or hers. How bitterly she recalled all this now! How blind she had been! Never could they have been happy together. She had not loved Andy Jerome--the female in her had succumbed to the male attraction that his vigorous manhood offered; she had surrendered to that alone. Dr. Shonto had been right. Dr. Shonto was always right. Andy Jerome was not for her. Now she saw that, with this dreadful thing constantly threatening him, his family had not urged him to mental performances which would strengthen his mind and character. Out of love for him they had let him go his way, well supplied with money, and with nothing to bother him. His schooling, she imagined, had been a mere pretence, designed to delude him and his friends into believing he was normal. In the end he would have turned out a failure, perhaps, but he would not have been the first failure in a rich man’s family. Nothing would have come of it, and he would have lived his life in blissful ignorance of the real cause of his failure. Dr. Inman Shonto, she believed, had counselled them to do this. She was thinking of Inman Shonto hourly these days--of his grave, kindly smile, his tolerance of human shortcomings, his knowledge, success, liberal ideas, and lofty idealism. She never once thought of his ugliness of face. In her picture of him she saw only the magnetic smile and the power of that face. It had occurred to her once--just once--that Shonto might have prolonged his return so that Andy would run out of his medicine, when he would be revealed to her in all his monstrousness. But she had put the ungenerous thought behind her instantly. Dr. Shonto never would stoop to such a thing as that. No, something serious had detained him. He would come to her soon, if it was possible for an aeroplane to cope successfully with the mountain blizzards that raged over the Valley of Arcana. He would return to her. She heard it in the unceasing song of the little water ouzel. She had lost track of the days. Andy now was helpless, insensible to cold and pain. At night she helped him to his blankets, made him lie down, and wrapped him up. She slept in the outer chamber of the cave now--slept fitfully, for she must needs be up every other hour to replenish the fire, lest her charge throw off his covering and freeze to death. Also her own covering was insufficient, for it was growing colder, and but for the cave and the leaping fire she surely would have suffered from the steadily lowering temperature.