You must go home and get into dry clothes;--please say you will go ?" Something warm and scintillating started from Jack's toes as the words left her lips, surged along his spinal column, set his finger tips tingling and his heart thumping like a trip hammer.

She had called him "Jack!" She had run a mile to rescue him and her father, and she was anxious lest he should endanger his precious life by catching cold.
Cold!--had he been dragged through the whirlpool of Niagara in the dead of winter with the thermometer at zero and then cast on a stranded iceberg he would now be sizzling hot.
Again she repeated her command,--this time in a more peremptory tone, the same anxious note in her voice.
"Please come, if daddy doesn't want you any more you must go home at once.

I wouldn't have you take cold for--" she did not finish the sentence; something in his face told her that her solicitude might already have betrayed her.
"Of course, I will go just as soon as you are rested a little, but you mustn't worry about me, Miss Ruth, I am as wet as a rat, I know, but I am that way half the time when it rains.

These tarpaulins let in a lot of water--" here he lifted his arms so she could see the openings herself--"and then I got in over my boots trying to plug the holes in the sluiceway with some plank." He was looking down into her eyes now.
Never had he seen her so pretty.

The exercise had made roses of her cheeks, and the up-turned face framed by the thatch of a bonnet bound with the veil, reminded him of a Madonna.
"And is everything all right with daddy?
And was there nobody in the shanties ?" she went on.