She did not stir when he came to her and knelt and put his hand against her cheek.  He was shocked to learn how cold she was.  Lightly he set his fingers against her softly pulsing throat; it was cold, like ice.  Plainly she was chilled through.  As he began unlacing her boots a curiously bitter thought came to him.  She was his; the marriage service had given her to him with her own willingness; his wife.  And now he was doing for her the first intimate little thing.  He drew off her boots and stockings and found that her feet were terribly cold.  He wrapped them in a hot blanket and hastened to set a pot of water on the coals.  While the water warmed he knelt and chafed her feet between his palms, afraid for a moment that they were frozen.  Finally, while he bathed them in steaming water, the dead white began to give place to a faint pinkness, like a blush, and again he put the blanket about them.

She had not moved.  When a second time he laid his hand against her throat the cold of it alarmed him.  He hesitated a moment; then, the urgent need being more than evident, he began swiftly to undo her outer garments.  The boyish shirt he unbuttoned and managed to remove; it was wet through, and stiff with frost.  He noted her under-garments, silken and foolish little things, with amazement; she had known no better than to wear such nonsensical affairs on a trip like this!  Good God, what did she know?  But he did not pause in his labours until he had slipped off the wet clothing.  Then he wrapped her in another warm blanket and placed her on her bed, her feet still to the blaze.  All of the time she had seemed, and probably was, hardly conscious.  Now only she opened her eyes.

“I can’t have you playing the fool and getting pneumonia,” he growled at her.  “We’ve got our hands full as it is.  Don’t you know enough to ...”

But she was not listening.  She stirred slightly, eased herself into a new position, cuddled her face against a bare arm, sighed, and went to sleep.

Chapter XXIII

All night King kept his fire blazing.  With several long sticks and a piece of the canvas, drawing deeply upon his ingenuity and almost to the dregs of his patience, he contrived a rude barrier to the cold across the mouth of the cave.  Countless times he rolled out of his own bunk, heavy-eyed and stiff, to readjust the screen when it had blown down, to put more wood on his fire, to make sure that Gloria was covered and warm, sleeping heavily, and not dead.  His nerves were frayed.  In the long night his fears grew, misshapen and grotesque.  Within his soul he prayed mutely that when morning came Gloria would be alive.  When with the first sickly streaks of dawn he went to put fresh fuel upon the dying embers he found that there was but a handful of wood left.  He came to stoop over the girl and listen to her breathing.  Then he descended the cliffs for more wood.