led at sharp right angles to the road to Saint Harry’s cabin.  It was, Pearl reflected, almost like walking through the tunnel of a mine; the snow walls on either side of her were as high as her head.  Occasionally the green fringes of a pine branch tapped her cheek sharply with their rusty needles.  Then the tunnel widened to a little clearing where stood the cabin, picturesque with the lichened bark of the trees on the rough-hewn logs.

Seagreave had evidently seen her coming, for before she lifted her hand to knock he threw open the door.  “Ah,” he cried, a touch of concern in his voice, “I was just going down to the other cabin to make up the fires before you came.  If you stopped there you must have found it cold, and you did stop,” his quick eye noting the change she had effected in her costume.

“Yes,” she smiled, “they wouldn’t let me come up the hill in Jose’s coat and my rose petticoats, and I felt like a miner in the clothes they lent me.”  She had entered the cabin and had taken the chair he had pushed up near the crackling, blazing fire of logs which he had just finished building to his satisfaction.  The bond of sympathy between Seagreave and Jose was probably that they both performed all manual tasks with a sort of beautiful precision.  Gallito had characterized Harry’s cabin as the cell of a monk.  It was indeed simple and plain to austerity, and yet it possessed the beauty of a prevailing order and harmony.  Shelves his own hands had made lined the rough walls and were filled with books; beside the wide fireplace was an open cupboard, displaying his small and shining store of cooking utensils.  For the rest a table or two and a few chairs were all the room contained.

It was the first time Pearl had ever been in the cabin, and, although she maintained the graceful languor of her pose, lying back a little wearily in her chair, yet her narrow, gleaming eyes pierced every corner of the room, with avid eagerness absorbing the whole, and then returning for a closer and more penetrating study of details, as if demanding from this room where he lived and thought a comprehensive revelation of him, a key to that remote, uncharted self which still evaded her.

Seagreave himself, whose visible presence was, for the time, outside the field of her conjecture, was busy preparing her breakfast, and now, after laying the cloth, he placed a chair for her at the table and announced that everything was ready.  He seated himself opposite her and Pearl’s heart thrilled at the prospect of this intimate tete-a-tete, the color rose on her cheek, her lashes trembled and fell.

“Where’s Jose?” she said hastily, to cover her slight, unusual embarrassment.  “Tell me quick how you managed it.  Neither Bob nor Pop could tell me because someone was always with us.”