Alice Deringham shivered all through.  “It is a little difficult,” she said.

Okanagan spoke to his horses, and after what appeared an interminable time looked down again.

“There,” he said, with a curious, almost silent laugh, and the girl saw a red blink amidst the pines across the valley.  “That’s Somasco.”

Alice Deringham let her head drop back on her father’s shoulder with a little sigh.  “It seems a very long way,” she said, “and I am very cold.”

It was some time later when the wagon stopped with a jerk, and she roused herself as a glare of light shone about her.  Voices came out of it, somebody held out a hand, and a man whom she did not recognize lifted her from the wagon.  Then she walked unevenly into the brightness of a log-walled hall and grew faint, while a tingling pain ran through her with the change of temperature.  A woman whom she did not know clumsily took her wrappings from her, and then led her into a room where Seaforth drew a chair up to a table beside the stove.  Alice Deringham’s head was throbbing, but she could see that he was white and haggard.

“How is he?” she said, and the tingling pain grew more pronounced as she waited the answer.

Seaforth’s face was very grave.  “I think it is touch and go with him—­but if he wears the night out he may pull through.  It was very good of you to come.”

Alice Deringham made a little gesture of impatience.  “But there is hope?” she said, and her voice was very low and strained.

Seaforth glanced round sharply as the woman, knocking over something, went out of the room.

“A little, I believe, if he could sleep,” he said huskily.  “The doctor is with him now—­scarcely left him the last four days.  We have nobody to help us.  Mrs. Margery broke down.  The woman you saw is incapable.  Harry has been delirious—­and asking for you—­half the time.”

Seaforth looked at his companion as he spoke, and the girl met his gaze directly.  There was no room for anything but frankness at such a time.

“Ah,” she said simply.  “I am glad I came.”

Seaforth’s eyes seemed to grow a little misty, and Alice Deringham, who suddenly looked aside, wondered whether it was only the effect of weariness.  Whatever he felt, he, however, quietly poured something into a cup and handed it to her.  “But you must eat,” he said.

Hungry and cold as she had been, the girl could eat but little, though the steaming liquid in the cup put a little life into her, and presently she rose up and shook off the coarse shawl which somebody had wrapped about her shoulders.

“I am ready now,” she said.

Seaforth glanced at her a moment with open admiration.  The girl to hide her weariness stood very straight, and Alice Deringham knew how to hold herself.  The pallor in her face intensified the little glow in her eyes and the ruddy gleam of her lustrous hair under the lamplight.  She was, it seemed to him, almost splendid in her statuesque symmetry, but there was also a subtle change in her, and a sudden sense of confusion came upon him.  He remembered his previous distrust of her, and that it was to save his comrade she had come.