Truedale shifted his position.  He was cramped and aching; still the even breathing did not break.  He laid her down gently and put a heavy coat about her—­one that earlier she had carried from the cabin in her effort to save him.  He went to the house and grimly set to work.  First he lighted a fire; then he righted the chairs and brought about some order from the chaos.  He was no longer afraid of any man on God’s earth; even Jim White was relegated to the non-essentials.  Truedale was merely a primitive creature caring for his own!  There was no turning back now—­no waiting upon conventions.  When he had made ready he was going out to bring his own to her home!

The sullen, soggy night, with its bursts of fury and periods of calm, had settled down, apparently, to a drenching, businesslike rain.  The natives knew how to estimate such weather.  By daylight the streams would be raging rivers on whose currents trees and animals would be carried ruthlessly to the lowlands.  Roads would be obliterated and human beings would seek shelter wherever they could find it.

But Truedale was spared the worry this knowledge might have brought him.  He concentrated now upon the present and grimly accepted conditions as they were.  All power or inclination for struggle was past; the inheritance of weakness which old William Truedale had feared and with which Conning himself had so contended in his barren youth, asserted itself and prepared to take unquestioningly what the present offered.

At that moment Truedale believed himself arbiter of his own fate and Nella-Rose’s.  Conditions had forced him to this position and he was ready to assume responsibility.  There was no alternative; he must accept things as they were and make them secure later on.  For himself the details of convention did not matter.  He had always despised them.  In his youthful spiritual anarchy he had flouted them openly; they made no claim upon his attention now, except where Nella-Rose was concerned.  Appearances were against him and her, but none but fools would allow that to daunt them.  He, Truedale, felt that no law of man was needed to hold him to the course he had chosen, back on the day when he determined to forsake the past and fling his fortunes in with the new.  Never in his life was Conning Truedale more sincere or, he believed, more wise, than he was at that moment.  And just then Nella-Rose appeared coming down the rain-drenched path like a little ghost in the grim, gray dawn.  She still wore the heavy coat he had put about her, and her eyes were dreamy and vague.

Truedale strode toward her and took her in his arms.

“My darling,” he whispered, “are you able to come with me now—­at once—­to the minister?  It must be now, sweetheart—­now!”

She looked at him like a child trying to understand his mood.

“Oh!” she said presently, “I ’most forgot.  The minister has gone to a burying back in the hills; he’ll be gone a right long time.  Bill Trim, who carries all the news, told me to-day.”