'You would not ask him to stay, if he wished to go?'
'Yes, I would; he must stay, for my sake.'
'But if he had loved you, dear, he would not have gone.'
'Did he say he did not love me?' demanded Silver, with gleaming eyes.
Old Fog hesitated.
'Did he say he did not love me? Did Jarvis say that?' she repeated, seizing his arm with grasp of fire.
'Yes; he said that.'
But the lie meant to rouse her pride, killed it; as if struck by a visible hand, she swayed and fell to the floor.
The miserable old man watched her all the night. She was delirious, and raved of Waring through the long hours. At daylight he left her with Orange, who, not understanding these white men's riddles, and sorely perplexed by Waring's desertion, yet cherished her darling with dumb untiring devotion, and watched her every breath.
Following the solitary trail over the snow-covered ice and thence along-shore towards the east journeyed old Fog all day in the teeth of the wind, dragging a sledge loaded with furs, provisions, and dry wood; the sharp blast cut him like a knife, and the dry snow-pellets stung as they touched his face, and clung to his thin beard coated with ice. It was the worst day of the winter, an evil, desolate, piercing day; no human creature should dare such weather. Yet the old man journeyed patiently on until nightfall, and would have gone farther had not darkness concealed the track; his fear was that new snow might fall deeply enough to hide it, and then there was no more hope of following. But nothing could be done at night, so he made his camp, a lodge under a drift with the snow for walls and roof, and a hot fire that barely melted the edges of its icy hearth. As the blaze flared out into the darkness, he heard a cry, and followed; it was faint, but apparently not distant, and after some search he found the spot; there lay Jarvis Waring, helpless and nearly frozen. 'I thought you farther on,' he said, as he lifted the heavy, inert body.