Then behind her came a sharp, loud explosion.  Brenda leapt high into the air and fell at Sheila’s feet.  At that first rifle-shot, Berg fled with shadow swiftness through the trees.  For the rest, it was as though a magic wall had stopped them, as though, at a certain point, they fell upon death.  Crack, crack, crack—­one after another, they came up, leapt, and dropped, choking and bleeding on the snow.  At the end Sheila turned blindly.  A yard behind her and slightly above her there under the pines stood Hilliard, very pale, his gun tucked under his arm, the smoking muzzle lowered.  Weakly she felt her way up toward him, groping with her hands.

He slid down noiselessly on his long skis and she stood clinging to his arm, looking up dumbly into his strained face.

“I heard your shots,” he said breathlessly.  “You’re within a hundred yards of my house....  For months I’ve been trying to make up my mind to come to you.  God forgive me, Sheila, for not coming before!”

Swinging his gun on its strap across his shoulder, he lifted her in his arms, and, like a child, she was carried through the silence of the woods, all barred with blood-red glimmers from a setting sun.

CHAPTER XII

THE GOOD OLD WORLD AGAIN

Hilliard carried Sheila into the house that he had built for her and laid her down in that big bedroom that “got the morning sun.”  For a while it seemed to him that she would never open her eyes again, and when she did regain consciousness she was so prostrate with her long fear and the shock of Miss Blake’s death that she lay there too weak to smile or speak, too weak almost to breathe.  Hilliard turned nurse, a puzzled, anxious nurse.  He would sit up in his living-room half the night, and when sleep overpowered his anxiety he would fall prone on the elk-hide rug before his fire.

At last Sheila pulled herself up and crept about the house.  She spent a day in the big log chair before Hilliard’s hearth, looking very wan, shrinking from speech, her soft mouth gray and drawn.

“Aren’t you ever going to smile for me again?” he asked her, after a long half-hour during which he had stood as still as stone, his arm along the pine mantelshelf, looking at her from the shelter of a propping hand.

She lifted her face to him and made a pitiful effort enough.  But it brought tears.  They ran down her cheeks, and she leaned back and closed her lids, but the crystal drops forced themselves out, clung to her lashes, and fell down on her clenched hands.  Hilliard went over to her and took the small, cold hands in both of his.

“Tell me about what happened, Sheila,” he begged her.  “It will help.”

Word by difficult word, he still holding fast to her hands, she sobbed and gasped out her story, to which he listened with a whitening face.  He gripped her hands tighter, then, toward the end, he rose with a sharp oath, lit his cigarette, paced to and fro.