but living, and he did not wonder why.  There was no question in his mind as to the manner in which she had been saved from the sea.  He felt a weakness in his limbs; he wanted to laugh, to cry out, to give himself up to strange inclinations for a moment or two, like a woman.  Such was the shock of his happiness.  It crept in a living fluid through his flesh.  She saw it in the swift change of the rock-like color in his face, and his quicker breathing, and was a little amazed, but Alan was too completely possessed by the one great thing to discover the astonishment growing in her eyes.

“You are alive,” he said, giving voice again to the one thought pounding in his brain. “Alive!”

It seemed to him that word wanted to utter itself an impossible number of times.  Then the truth that was partly dawning came entirely to the girl.

“Mr. Holt, you did not receive my letter at Nome?” she asked.

“Your letter?  At Nome?” He repeated the words, shaking his head.  “No.”

“And all this time—­you have been thinking—­I was dead?”

He nodded, because the thickness in his throat made it the easier form of speech.

“I wrote you there,” she said.  “I wrote the letter before I jumped into the sea.  It went to Nome with Captain Rifle’s ship.”

“I didn’t get it.”

“You didn’t get it?” There was wonderment in her voice, and then, if he had observed it, understanding.

“Then you didn’t mean that just now?  You didn’t intend to do it?  It was because you had blamed yourself for my death, and it was a great relief to find me alive.  That was it, wasn’t it?”

Stupidly he nodded again.  “Yes, it was a great relief.”

“You see, I had faith in you even when you wouldn’t help me,” she went on.  “So much faith that I trusted you with my secret in the letter I wrote.  To all the world but you I am dead—­to Rossland, Captain Rifle, everyone.  In my letter I told you I had arranged with the young Thlinkit Indian.  He smuggled the canoe over the side just before I leaped in, and picked me up.  I am a good swimmer.  Then he paddled me ashore while the boats were making their search.”

In a moment she had placed a gulf between them again, on the other side of which she stood unattainable.  It was inconceivable that only a few moments ago he had crushed her in his arms.  The knowledge that he had done this thing, and that she was looking at him now as if it had never happened, filled him with a smothering sense of humiliation.  She made it impossible for him to speak about it, even to apologize more fully.

“Now I am here,” she was saying in a quiet, possessive sort of way.  “I didn’t think of coming when I jumped into the sea.  I made up my mind afterward.  I think it was because I met a little man with red whiskers whom you once pointed out to me in the smoking salon on the Nome.  And so—­I am your guest, Mr. Holt.”