Dickie spoke carefully, using his strange gift.  With every word his face grew a trifle whiter, but that had no effect upon his eloquence.  He painted a vivid and touching picture of the shattered and wistful youth.  He repeated the shaken words of remorse and love.  “I want her to come East and marry me.  I love her.  Tell her I love her.  Tell her I can give her everything she wants in all the world.  Tell her to come—­” And far more skillfully than ever Hilliard himself could have done, Dickie pleaded the intoxication of that sudden shower of gold, the bewildering change in the young waif’s life, the necessity he was under to go and see and touch the miracle.  There was a long silence after Dickie had delivered himself of the burden of his promise.  The fire leapt and crackled on Hilliard’s forsaken hearth.  It threw shadows and gleams across Dickie’s thin, exhausted face and Sheila’s inscrutably thoughtful one.

She held out her hand.

“Give me the letters now, Dickie.”

He handed her the bundle that had accumulated in Rusty and the little withered one taken from the body of the trapper.  Sheila took them and held them on her knee.  She pressed both her hands against her eyes; then, leaning toward the fire, she read the letters, beginning with that one that had spent so many months under the dumb snow.

Berg, who had investigated Dickie, leaned against her knee while she read, his eyes fixed upon her.  She read and laid the pile by on the table behind her.  She sat for a long while, elbows on the arms of her chair, fingers laced beneath her chin.  She seemed to be looking at the fire, but she was watching Dickie through her eyelashes.  There was no ease in his attitude.  He had his arms folded, his hands gripped the damp sleeves of his coat.  When she spoke, he jumped as though she had fired a gun.

“It is not true, Dickie, that things were—­were that way between Cosme and me ...  We had not settled to be married ...”  She paused and saw that he forced himself to sit quiet.  “Do you really think,” she said, “that the man that wrote those letters, loves me?” Dickie was silent.  He would not meet her look.  “So you promised Hilliard that you would take me back to marry him?” There was an edge to her voice.

Dickie’s face burned cruelly.  “No,” he said with shortness.  “I was going to take you to the train and then come back here.  I am going to take up this claim of Hilliard’s—­he’s through with it.  He likes the East.  You see, Sheila, he’s got the whole world to play with.  It’s quite true.”  He said this gravely, insistently.  “He can give you everything—­”

“And you?”

Dickie stared at her with parted lips.  He seemed afraid to breathe lest he startle away some hesitant hope.  “I?” he whispered.

“I mean—­you don’t like the East?—­You will give up your work?”

“Oh—­” He dropped back.  The hope had flown and he was able to breathe again, though breathing seemed to hurt.  “Yes, ma’am.  I’ll give up newspaper reporting.  I don’t like New York.”