One could have fancied him at home among men of leisure and cultivated tastes, but he seemed out of place in a log-built ranch in the snow-wrapped wilderness swept by the bitter wind.

Perhaps he realized it, for his voice was querulous as he said, "I wonder if you have forgotten, Nellie, that we were sitting warm and safe in England five years ago tonight." Nellie Townshead looked up quickly over her sewing from the other side of the stove, and for a moment there was something akin to pain in her eyes.

They were clear brown eyes, and it was characteristic that they almost immediately brightened into a smile, for while the girl's face resembled her father's in its refinement, there was courage in it in place of weariness.
"I am afraid I do, though I try not to, and am generally able," she said.
Townshead sighed.

"The young are fortunate, for they can forget," he said.

"Even that small compensation is, however, denied to me, while the man I called my friend is living in luxury on what was yours and mine.