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122 "She is sorry." Jennifer's voice dropped to whispered pleading. "She never meant it. She did it just in a moment because she was so tired, and it cried so. She never meant to do it."

"Please" said Tempest, and his eyes contracted. The matter was painful enough without this.

"She doesn't know any better," said Jennifer. "She only knows about the things that frighten her—about the woman who was a weetigo and who came in the night and wanted the baby—and the winds that make noises—and the husband who was unkind to her. They couldn't have her at the Mission because you know they are so short of money—and she was all alone—and the weetigo woman told her to do it—and she is so sorry."

It was the one woman's heart interpreting through this girl the mother-love of all women. Tempest recognised it. But he laid his hand on the latch.

"Do you think I have no pity for her?" he said. "But I must go in. I am as much under the law as she is."

"The law!" cried Jennifer, and bit her teeth together. "Oh! I think I hate the law."

"You are thinking of man's law," said Tempest, and smiled a little. "I wasn't meaning only that."

He pulled up the latch and stepped over the threshold with that quiet manner of his which seemed to carry the hush of finality with it. Jennifer heard the half-choked cry as Florestine saw him, and it drove home the truth of his words. In order that the world may go on sin must be punished, rooted out, crushed into death. Nature demands it, and opposite the neglect of this law she sets the extinction and the degradation of the race. Jennifer stood for a little in the great white day with bowed head. Then she followed Tempest into the shack.

It was very cold in the shack, for Florestine had made no fire since the baby died. It smelt of moose-skin and coal-oil and all airless greasiness and wood-smoke. Near the burnt-out lamp on the rough table lay a pair of half- finished moccasins with the strips of white doe-skin and the litter of beads and gay silks. Florestine had been working on them for an order when the peevish crying of