Now as Riatt finished building his fire, and began to bring in buckets of snow to supply their need of water, the gentle flow of her flattery soothed him as the sound of a hidden brook in the leafy month of June.  Nor, strangely enough, did the fact that he dimly apprehended its purpose in the least interfere with his enjoyment.

“If ever I’m thrown away on a desert island, I speak to be thrown away with you,” she said.  “There isn’t another man of my acquaintance who could bring order out of these primitive conditions.”

He laughed.  “Well, you know,” he said, “this isn’t really what you’d call primitive.  I was snowed up in Alaska once.”

“Alaska!  You’ve been snowed up in Alaska?” she echoed in the tone of a child who says:  was it a black bear?

Oh, yes, it lightened his toil.  Nevertheless, he asked for her assistance in trying to find something to eat.  She knew no more about the kitchen than he did, but she advanced toward a door and opened it gingerly between her thumb and forefinger.  It was the kitchen closet.  She opened a tin box.

“There is something here that looks like gravel,” she called.  He rushed to her side.  It was cereal.  He found other supplies, too, a little salt, sugar, coffee, and a jar of bacon.

“How clever of you to know what they all are,” she murmured, and he felt as if he had invented them out of thin air, like an Eastern magician.

He carried them back to the kitchen.  “I wonder if you’d get the coffee grinder,” he said.

She hadn’t the faintest idea what a coffee grinder looked like, but she went away to find it, and came back presently with an object strange enough to serve any purpose.

“Is this it?” she asked.

“That’s a meat chopper,” he answered, and then laughed.  “You’re not a very good housekeeper, are you?”

“Of course not,” she said.  “Did you ever know an agreeable woman who was?  Good housekeepers are always bores, because they can never for an instant get their minds off the most tiresome things in the world like bills, and how the servants are behaving.  All clever women are bad housekeepers, and so they always find some one like you to take care of them.”

He was putting the cereal to boil, and answered only after a second.  “Perhaps you’ll think me old-fashioned, but I cannot help respecting the art of housekeeping.”

“Oh, so do I in its place,” replied Miss Fenimer.  “My maid does the whole thing capitally.  But let me give you a test.  Think of the very best housekeeper you ever met.  Would you like to have her here instead of me?  You may be quite candid.”

Riatt stopped and considered an instant with his head on one side.  “She’d make me awfully comfortable,” he said.

Miss Fenimer nodded, as much as to say:  yes, but even so—­

“No,” he said at length, as if the decision had been close.  “No, after all I would rather do the work and have you.  But it isn’t because you are a poor housekeeper that I prefer you.  It’s because—­”