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280 he would not understand; and yet he might. She pressed both hands to her breast and drew a long breath, for her heart was breaking. Through her misted eyes she could barely see the shimmer of the cross.

That sight made her look up, searching for a superhuman aid in her woe, and for the first time in her life a conception of God dawned on her wild, gay mind. She made a picture of him like a vast cloud looming over the Twin Bear peaks and breathing an infinite calm over the mountains. The cloud took a faintly human shape—a shape somewhat like that of her father when he lived, for he could be both stern and gentle, as she well knew, and such gray Boone had been.

Perhaps it was because of this that another picture came out of her infancy of a soft voice, of a tender-touching hand, of brooding, infinitely loving eyes. She smiled the wan smile again because for the first time it came to her that she, too, even she, the wild, the "tiger-heart," as Pierre himself had called her, might one day have been the mother of a child, his child.

But the ache within her grew so keen that she dropped, writhing, to her knees, and twisted her hands together in agony. It was prayer. There were no words to it, but it was prayer, a wild appeal for aid.

That aid came in the form of a calm that swept on her like the flood of a clear moonlight over a storm-beaten landscape. The whisper which had come to her before was now a solemn-speaking