Dan held a chair for her in front of the fireplace, and she took it with entire naturalness. He was careful to put it where the firelight was at its height. He wanted to see its effect on the flushed cheeks, the soft dark hair. And then, standing in the shadows, he simply watched her. With the eye of an artist he delighted in her gestures, her rippling enthusiasm, her utter, irrepressible girlishness that all of Time had not years enough to kill. He decided that she had gray eyes. Gray eyes seemed to be characteristic of the mountain people. Sometimes, when the shadows fell across them, they looked very dark, as if the pines had been reflected in them all day and the image had not yet faded out. But in an instant the shadow flicked away and left only light,--light that danced and light that laughed and light that went into him and did all manner of things to his spirit. Bill stood watching her, his hands deep in his pockets, evidently a companion of the best. Her father gazed at her with amused tolerance. And Dan,--he didn't know in just what way he did look at her. And he didn't have time to decide. In less than fifteen minutes, and wholly without warning, she sprang up from her chair and started toward the door. "Good Lord!" Dan breathed. "If you make such sudden motions as that I'll have heart failure. Where are you going now?" "Back to my watch," she answered, her tone wholly lacking the personal note which men have learned to expect in the voices of women. And an instant later the three of them saw her retreating shadow as she vanished among the pines. Dan had to be helped to bed. The long ride had been too hard on his shattered lungs; and nerves and body collapsed an instant after the door was closed behind the departing girl. He laughed weakly and begged their pardon; and the two men were really very gentle. They told him it was their own fault for permitting him to overdo. Lennox himself blew out the candle in the big, cold bedroom. Dan saw the door close behind him, and he had an instant's glimpse of the long sweep of moonlit ridge that stretched beneath the window. Then, all at once, seemingly without warning, it simply blinked out. Not until the next morning did he really know why. Insomnia was an old acquaintance of Dan's, and he had expected to have some trouble in getting to sleep. His only real trouble was waking up again when Lennox called him to breakfast. He couldn't believe that the light at his window shade was really that of morning. "Good Heavens!" his host exploded. "You sleep the sleep of the just." Dan was about to tell him that on the contrary he was a very nervous sleeper, but he thought better of it. Something had surely happened to his insomnia. The next instant he even forgot to wonder about it in the realization that his tired body had been wonderfully refreshed. He had no dread now of the long tramp up the ridge that his host had planned.