Carefully he laid Helen upon his coat near the fire, and continued to rub her body until her eyelids quivered and she opened her big blue eyes and looked about.
She saw the camp fire, the strange looking cave and the big handsome figure bending over her…. First she looked startled, then when she slowly realized their predicament she became hysterical, threw herself into her rescuer's arms and wept.
And each knew, as the one man and the one woman will always know by intuition, that fiction has no miracles such as are found in the book of life. Lips may dissemble, but there is no need of speech when heart meets its mate. Jack gathered her to his breast and soothed her as best he could. It was so good to look in her face and to hear her voice; her heart was so pure and her soul so lily white: her eyes like violets wet with the morning dew….
When she was quieter, Jack whispered in his fine manly voice quivering with earnestness: "Helen, my own, will you be my wife, my own sweet little wife until death do us part?"
"Until death do us part, I will!" she whispered, and surely the angels must have recorded that sacred promise. Her voice was suffused with a world of tenderness as she breathed the words. From his coat pocket Jack produced a plain gold band. "My mother's wedding ring," he said, "it has never left me since I said good-bye to her and laid her to rest. I have been looking for a woman who would be as worthy of wearing it"…. and he slipped it on her finger and kissed the hand it graced. And then and there they pledged their troth…..
"I love you with all my heart and soul, my own sweet woman, and before God we can do no harm: with love such as ours there can be no such thing as sin. Society is a tissue of pretense: convention a fleeting fantom. My sweet bride of tonight."
Splendidly conscious of her sweet sacrifice, she smiled at tomorrows…. "There is this hour and we live; if sin it is, it is yet divine; the happiest hour of my life, because I am loved and I love so much."….
Adieu to duty and creeds, love's altar has vestments of rosebud lips and starry eyes with whispered words of love divine: "Sin," it's said; but if with the one all holy love, what care we for the reckoning hour…..
"Oh! Helen dear, you are missing the most gorgeous sunrise of creation!"
[Illustration with caption: LAKE TAHOE]