“I think I’d better sit up and keep the fire going,” he replied, heroically. “There’s a big log out there that I’m going to bring in to roll up on the windward side.”
“It’ll be cold and wet early in the morning, and I don’t like to hunt kindling in the snow,” she said. “I always get everything ready the night before. I wish you had a better bed. It seems selfish of me to have the tent while you are cold.”
One by one—under her supervision—he made preparations for morning. He cut some shavings from a dead, dry branch of fir and put them under the fly, and brought a bucket of water from the creek, and then together they dragged up the dead tree.
Had the young man been other than he was, the girl’s purity, candor, and self-reliance would have conquered him, and when she withdrew to the little tent and let fall the frail barrier between them, she was as safe from intrusion as if she had taken refuge behind gates of triple brass. Nothing in all his life had moved him so deeply as her solicitude, her sweet trust in his honor, and he sat long in profound meditation. Any man would be rich in the ownership of her love, he admitted. That he possessed her pity and her friendship he knew, and he began to wonder if he had made a deeper appeal to her than this.
“Can it be that I am really a man to her,” he thought, “I who am only a poor weakling whom the rain and snow can appall?”
Then he thought of the effect of this night upon her life. What would Clifford Belden do now? To what deeps would his rage descend if he should come to know of it?
Berrie was serene. Twice she spoke from her couch to say: “You’d better go to bed. Daddy can’t get here till to-morrow now.”
“I’ll stay up awhile yet. My boots aren’t entirely dried out.”
As the flame sank low the cold bit, and he built up the half-burned logs so that they blazed again. He worked as silently as he could; but the girl again spoke, with sweet authority: “Haven’t you gone to bed yet?”
“Oh yes, I’ve been asleep. I only got up to rebuild the fire.”