“I hope you will accept this, Miss Cora.”

The girl took it with a smile, but before she could open her lips to express her thanks, the youth had bowed, turned from the carriage, and was speeding his way up the rough mountain path, springing from crag to crag up to the ledge on which old Scythia’s hut stood.

Cora opened the parcel and found an inch-square little casket of red morocco.  She opened this with a spring, and found a small gold heart reposing in a bed of white satin.

“How pretty it is!” she said softly to herself, as she took the trinket from its case.  “Look, grandma, what Rule has brought me for a Christmas gift!  A little gold heart!  A pure gold heart!  His is a pure gold heart, is it not?” she added, earnestly, as she placed the trinket in the lady’s hand.

Mrs. Rockharrt looked at it with interest, and then passed it on to her eldest son.

The ride was continued, and presently the carriage was driven off the boat and up the avenue leading to the house.  As the vehicle drew up before the front doors, a pretty picture might have been seen through the drawing-room windows.

A bright fireside, an old man reclining in his luxurious arm-chair; a beautiful girl seated on a hassock at his feet, reading to him, and at intervals lifting her lovely blue eyes in childish adoration to his face.  They might have been grandfather and granddaughter, but they were, in fact, old Aaron Rockharrt and Miss Rose Flowers—­Merlin and Vivien again, except that the Iron King was rather a rugged and unmanageable Merlin.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, Regulas Rothsay had climbed the rugged mountain path that led to Scythia’s hut.  On the back of the broad shelf of rock on which the hut stood was a hollow in the side of the precipice.  Scythia had cleared out this hollow of all its natural litter.  Before this apartment she had built another room, with no better material than fragments of rock found on the spot, and filled in with earth, moss and twigs.  She had roofed this over with branches of evergreens piled thick and high, to keep off rain and sun.  A heavy buffalo robe, fastened with large wooden pins at its top to the roof of the hut, served for a door.  There was no window.  In the inner or cavernous apartment she had built a rude fire-place and chimney going up through a hole in the rock.  A pallet of rough furs and coarse blankets lay in one corner of this room, and a few rude cooking utensils occupied another.  In the outer room there was a rough oak table and two chairs.

Up before the edge of this natural shelf on which the hut stood appeared the tops of a thicket of pine trees that grew on the mountain side fifty feet below.  Up behind this shelf arose other pines, height above height, until their highest tops seemed to pierce the clouds.

When Rule reached this shelf, he found the tops of the pine trees, the ground, and the hut all covered with snow.