had met Mary on the road.

He came near nightfall, on snowshoes, and when he knocked it was the
girl who opened the door. At first, she did not recognize him because
the mountain tan had given way to a pallor of recent illness and the
face was very thin. But as soon as he smiled, the whimsical eyes
proclaimed him.

"You--you haven't died yet," Mary Burton spoke instinctively, and stood
holding the door open to the blustering of the sharp wind, quite
forgetful that she was barring his way. But the young man who had come
out of the thickening twilight laughed. He shook the snow off his
mackinaw, for a fresh downfall was making the air almost as white as the
drifts below.

"Not yet," he assured her, "but unless you let me come in out of the
cold I shall probably perish on your doorstep."

Tom Burton, the father, sat gazing at the stove in the center of the
room. He was propped in a heavy chair with cushions about him, and he,
too, had grown thinner and rawer of joint. He had been for some time
thus silently staring ahead with a pipe long forgotten and dead of ash
in his hand and an old newspaper--so old as to be no longer a
newspaper--lying where it had dropped near his side. A painter might
have seen in the pose a picture of the felled and beaten fighter; the
burden-bearer chafing under enforced idleness and the imprisonment of an
irritable convalescence.

"Yes, come in, or go out, whoever you are--and _shut the door_!" There
was no hospitality in the irascible greeting of the manor's lord, and