She had thrust her feet toward him and was wriggling them inside her boots, so that he heard the slushing sound of water.  “Ugh, but they are wet!” she shivered.  “Will you unlace them and pull them off for me, Jeems?”

He laid his pipe aside and knelt close to her.  It took him five minutes to get the boots off.  Then he held one of her sodden little feet close between his two big hands.

“Cold—­cold as ice,” he said.  “You must take off your stockings, Marette.  Please.”

He arranged a pile of wood in front of the stove and covered it with a blanket which he pulled from one of the bunks.  Then, still on his knees, he drew the cane chair close to the fire and covered it with a second blanket.  A few moments later Marette was tucked comfortably in this chair, with her bare feet on the blanketed pile of wood.  Kent opened the stove door.  Then he extinguished one of the smoking candles, and after that, the other.  The flaming birch illumined the little cabin with a mellower light.  It gave a subdued flush to the girl’s face.  Her eyes seemed to Kent wonderfully soft and beautiful in that changed light.  And when he had finished, she reached out a hand, and for an instant it touched his face and his wet hair so lightly that he sensed the thrilling caress of it without feeling its weight.

“You are so good to me, Jeems,” she said, and he thought there was a little choking note in her throat.

He had seated himself on the floor, close to her chair, with his back to the wall.  “It is because I love you, Gray Goose,” he replied quietly, looking straight into the fire.

She was silent.  She, too, was looking into the fire.  Close over their heads they heard the beating of the rain, like a thousand soft little fists pounding the top of the cabin.  Under them they could feel the slow swinging of the scow as it responded to the twists and vagaries of the current that was carrying them on.  And Kent, unseen by the girl who was looking away from him, raised his eyes.  The birch light was glowing in her hair; it trembled on her white throat; her long lashes were caught in the shimmer of it.  And, looking at her, Kent thought of Kedsty lying back in his bungalow room, choked to death by a tress of that glorious hair, so near to him now that, by leaning a little forward, he might have touched it with his lips.  The thought brought him no horror.  For even as he looked, one of her hands crept up to her cheek—­the small, soft hand that had touched his face and hair as lightly as a bit of thistle-down—­and he knew that two hands like that could not have killed a man who was fighting for life when he died.

And Kent reached up, and took the hand, and held it close in his own, as he said, “Little Gray Goose, please tell me now—­what happened in Kedsty’s room?”

His voice thrilled with an immeasurable faith.  He wanted her to know, no matter what had happened, that this faith and his love for her could not be shaken.  He believed in her, and would always believe in her.