They had made their scanty suppers; after it both were hungry.  They had been hungry thus for four days.  There remained coffee and sugar enough for another half-dozen meagre meals; here the affluence ended.  The bacon was down to a piece of fat two inches thick and seven inches long; there was bacon grease a couple of inches deep in a tomato-can; there was a teacup of flour; there was one small tin of sardines and a smaller one of devilled meat.  To-day they were hungry, to-morrow they would be a great deal hungrier, the next day they would begin to starve....  King got up and went out, down the cliffs in the dark, for a last load of wood.  When he came back she was lying on her bed, her face from the light.  He stood a moment looking at her.  Then for the last time he spoke to her: 

“If I am long gone, you understand why.  It would be best to save food all you can; not to stir about much, since exercise means burning up more strength, which must be renewed and by still more food....  There is not a chance in a thousand now that those men will find this place; if they do, there is not a chance in another thousand that they will find the middle cave.  You will be safe enough....  And, if I do not get back to-morrow, you will know that within three days more, or four at most, there will be a party in here to bring you out.”

Chapter XXVII

Gloria awoke with a start.  She had not heard King go, yet she knew that she was alone in the cave.  Alone!  She sat up, clutching her blankets about her.  Objects all around her were plunged into darkness, but where the canvas let in the morning she saw a patch of drear, chill light.  Full morning.  Then by now Mark King was far away.

Oh, the pitiless loneliness of the world as she sat there in the gloom of the cavern, her heart as cheerless as the drear light creeping in, as cold as the dead charred sticks where last night’s fire had burnt itself out.  And, oh, the terrible, merciless silence about her.  She sat plunged into a despondency beyond the bourne of tears, a slim, white-bodied, gaunt-eyed girl crushed, beaten by a relentless destiny, lost to the world, shut in between two terrors—­the black unknown of the deeper cavern, the white menace of a waste wilderness.  And far more than pinch of cold or bite of hunger was her utter solitude unbearable.

She sprang up and built a fire.  Less for the warmth, though she was cold to the bone, than for the sense of companionship.  The homely flames were like flames in remembered fireplaces; their voices were as the voices of those other fires; their light, though showing only cold rock walls and rude camp equipment, was the closest thing she had to companionship.  She came close to the fire and for a long time would not move from it.