The Raising of the Dead

BY M. W. AND A. KINROSS

.

WOMAN sat on a rock that jutted from the slope of the foothills that rise—bare in places, and in others sparsely clothed with ragged spruce and birch—above the banks of the Yukon River. Not more than two hundred miles to the north of her the Arctic Circle cut that land of surface sponge and ice and iron underneath with its imaginary radius. She wore a short skirt of dark, strong cloth, stout boots, leggings of dressed deerskin, a crimson sweater, a small cap of squirrel fur with the brush hanging tassel-like at the side. Now and then she made a slight flinching movement of the shoulders as the north wind searched her out more keenly where she sat among the rocks. As yet, in these last days of August, he only touched men lightly, in warning; a month from now the summer's truce would be ended, and the north wind be an enemy outright, with whom men grappled to the death.

On Leona Harmon's knee a copy of an illustrated paper, now five months old, lay open at a picture of a clumsily modelled airship, and her eyes travelled from the illustration to a red-shouldered hawk that hung on wide suspended pinions above the wood. Already the tide of immigration led by rumour of gold in this region began to flow northward, and to cover even the stony ranges and leprous tundras of this bleak wilderness. Already the wild animals huddled deeper between the cleft breasts of the hills; already to the south the steam-engine's shriek tore the curtained silence of inviolate centuries. And now was to come a more unavoidable invasion than that of the railway. Not even the birds would be private in their nests; the eyrie of the hawk and the eagle would be peered into by these soaring ships that flew over them. There would remain no place where the forest things could hide; no place where men and women who had been hurt and shamed among their fellows could escape reminder; where they could shed their pasts as a garment and go forth naked into the forests to be clothed again with gradual forgetfulness and peace. A line came to her out of the book of prophecies: “And there shall be no more near nor far....” It was meant as a promise of hope; to her it was the pronouncement of a doom.

Ten years she and Harmon had lived here in their thick-walled log-house with its great chimney; but at all seasons except mid-winter the sky and the woods covered them for more hours than their roof. In the summer they camped upon some clearer salmon stream, or on a small shallow lake of their discovery that no one but themselves frequented. In the autumn they tracked the moose and caribou, sleeping by night on beds of spruce boughs. In the winter the snow packed them in and sealed them with the white seals of its silence, and for months the only sound they heard, beside each other's speech and the icy ruffle of the wind over the snow, was the stamping of the moose where they scraped themselves shelters in the lee of the cabin wall. It seemed then that only the sky was alive, the sky that throbbed and palpitated like a heart with violent pulsations of light; or upon which long streamers of colour were spread as if it were the palette on which an artist mixed his pigments—the raw original stuff with which he would paint the earth when its blank surface was given back to him, to be stippled with violets and greens, with umbers and madders—with the whole chromatic scale of spring.

There had been times when the immense monotony got upon her nerves a little; when she felt the winter as the arch-destroyer. In the neighbourhood of their cabin, two years before a log of it was laid, a cairn had marked the grave of a hunter who had perished of hunger and cold; and when near it she had watched the red arctic moss spreading like a stain, it seemed to her that the blood of man cried from the ground, screamed out of the radiance of this white expanse. That was at first. She had grown used to the winters now, and they were offset by the quicksilver blood of autumn in her veins, by the lyric pleasure of her body in spring, when her spirit slipped its winter sheath and ran ranging on the feet of winds that touched the first green spears of grass. More than offset by the calm of night-heavens that soothed into insignificance all human wrong. She had books, too, which they ordered on their trips to Sitka or Seattle; for to either one or the other of these places they went yearly to supply their necessities, returning as soon as they could. In summer visitors came to them sometimes. One was on his way now. For an hour she had watched him riding towards her, by turns lost in the thickets of stunted growth and emerging into the open again. Her clear woodsman's eye told her that it was Gordon Semple, who sometimes hunted with Harmon.

She stood up and waved to him now, and as he came within hail, “How is it you're riding so light?” she asked. “Haven't you any pack? You look as if you hadn't left camp far behind.”

“I haven't,” he answered, as he threw himself from his horse and shook hands with her; “I left it about nine miles down the river. The fact is, I'm not alone; I've a friend and a guide with me. I've ridden on ahead to present our visiting cards, so to speak. I didn't like to take you unawares.”

“How ceremonious we're getting in the wilderness!” she said, with a touch of lightest irony. “Visiting cards are of use only where people may wish to excuse themselves. Did you ever hear of anybody who lived in the woods who wasn't at home to a friend or a friend's friend, or a stranger, for that matter?”

“In the Yukon you might stretch it further and say, even to an enemy. It wasn't that.” He slipped his arm through the pony's bridle, and they walked on together in the direction of the house. “I want to persuade Harmon into joining us on an expedition,” he pursued. “You have the half-breed and his wife, haven't you? so you won't be left alone.”

“Yes, I've Laurent and Marie. Is it a hunting trip?” she added, wondering a little; for twice she and Harmon and Gordon Semple had hunted together, and her sex was not wont to bar her from such expeditions.

“Halloo, Gordon, old man!” a voice called heartily down the side of the mountain as Clive Harmon came striding towards them, his gun across his shoulder, and his dog—a big collie crossed with huskie—at his heels.

When he heard that Semple had left a companion down the river, Harmon was for going and fetching him at once; but Semple said, “Oh, leave him there to-night; the guide's with him, and we couldn't go and come back before dark. I'll stay here now, and we'll go down first thing to-morrow morning and bring 'em back with us.”

It was not till after supper, when the shortening twilight had begun to settle down, that Semple touched upon the object of his visit. He and his host sat smoking before the fire in the living-room of Harmon's four-roomed shack—a long, low room with a wide-throated chimney, skins of fox and bear upon the floor, other pelts covering the walls, everywhere warmth and the material of warmth.

“What's this expedition you want me to join, Gordon? you're too early for moose,” Harmon had just asked.

“No, it's a man-hunt this time,” Semple answered, as he packed his pipe with a deliberate finger.

“Ah, well, that's one quarry I don't go after. You know how I feel about that sort of thing.”

“Yes, yes, I remember when I brought the Mounted this way after Blue Pete, who had murdered Lepine. I don't care for that kind of game myself, but this is different. I'm only helping a wise child to know its own father. You've heard of Skeene's expedition that started out from Skagway about a dozen years ago, haven't you? Skookum Bill, a half-breed Indian, had shown Skeene some gold he found in the bed of a creek that flows into Mackenzie River, and Skeene fitted out an expedition for exploring and prospecting up in that country. In his party was an Englishman who had just come over—Lord Malmain. After they had been out four or five weeks he and Skeene quarrelled, and Malmain left the party, taking only a guide with him. He didn't tell anybody where he was going, but the only possible conjecture was that he would head for the nearest Hudson Bay station. Of course they couldn't go on, two men practically without supplies, in that wilderness. When Skeene's party returned they found that nothing had ever been heard of Malmain. He never showed up at Skagway; he never showed up anywhere, so far as men knew. Skeene's conscience wasn't easy, and he organised a search-party. Malmain was an important man at home, with title, position, and big estates, and naturally the Canadian Government heard from England on the subject. The woods about where he disappeared were pretty well beaten up, but not a trace did they ever find of him, alive or dead. Since these finds last summer on Rabbit country's Creek, this getting pretty populous, but twelve years ago it was desolate enough, God knows.... The Government did their best with trappers, and traders, and the Mounted, but it was all no use. There were some who didn't accept the fact of Malmain's death, and held that it happened with him as it's happened with other men—that he just went off to the back of beyond and dropped out, and that's the long and the short of it. There were one or two men in the party who believed that he always intended to leave it and cover his trail.”

Harmon had listened in silence. “Well, if a man wants to trek out and lose his trail,” he now moralised, “he's a right to, provided he hasn't committed a crime, and the body social doesn't consider he owes it his life as forfeit. What are you trying to do?” he ended: “hunt him up? It's a pretty cold scent you've struck.”

“It is a cold scent. That's what makes it so difficult. I'm anxious to enlist you. You know this country—all up beyond here—like a book, and you've a keen nose.”

“So you've come to me to help you find Malmain, have you? What's the anxiety?”

“The anxiety is that he left a wife and child.”

“They don't seem to have been in any hurry about it. A dead man's pretty dead in twelve years.”.

“If he is dead,” Semple reminded him. “We may leave the wife out, I think. I've an idea—and it's purely my own idea, you understand—that the wife was chiefly responsible for Malmain's disappearance. At any rate, she didn't prolong the agony. She promptly became a widow and married as soon as decency would let her. The fact is, it looks rather as though Malmain's successor had been there ready all the time. She waited just six months for her absent lord to return, and, when he didn't, she applied to the proper quarter for leave to consider him dead. Then she married again. That's all, so far as she's concerned; but the boy grew up”

“Malmain's son, eh?” Harmon had put in quietly.

“He had a son, then,” Leona Harmon said, looking up from her knitting.

“It's his son I'm with—young Lord Malmain.”

“What made him wait so long?” she asked again,

“When his father went away, Malcolm Malmain was a little chap getting ready for Eton. I've worked out that part of the story to suit myself as well, though young Malmain has supplied a good many links. Lying out these nights that we've been travelling together, round the camp-fire under the stars, men get to be pretty intimate. Though Malmain has had a good many reticences, they've taught me more than what he said. The way he would pull up on a short rein sometimes, when speaking of his mother, for instance. If there was scandal about her—mind you, I don't know that there was—I'm guessing again—he was too young to have heard it; but as the years passed he may have reflected and pondered, and noted how quickly his mother's second marriage followed on his father's death. He couldn't help but recognise with what indecent haste her ladyship had buried her lord's memory firmly underground. There were children by the second marriage, and I judge they were another wedge that drove mother and son farther apart. He spent his Eton and Oxford holidays at Malmain Hall instead of at Trenly Heath, his stepfather's place. It must have been lonely loafing round those great rooms and silent corridors, but it was then evidently that he began identifying himself so entirely with his father's side of the family. He was pretty effectually an orphan, and he began seriously to consider the possibility that he might have a living father, as well as a living mother who was no use to him. I don't know with what visitings of his father's spirit our young Hamlet was troubled; but it never had been laid, you know, with bell and book and Christian burial.”

“You're making him out a rather morbid milksop,” Harmon now interrupted; “but, perhaps, he is one?”

“Not a bit of it!” and Gordon Semple laughed. “A big, athletic chap; plays polo and hunts; a county cricketer, I understand. No milksop—only he'd like to have his father buried in the family vault if he's dead, and make sure if he isn't. Natural enough, it seems to me. Two years ago he got hold of Skeene's book giving the history of the expedition, in which he blames himself sharply for the quarrel, acknowledges that he spoke to Malmain in a way he had no right to, but says that he can't understand Malmain's total disappearance, for he had the best guide in the whole North-West, and it was June of a remarkably open summer—no blizzards, no storms.”

“There are a hundred ways in which a man may die out here; and in those days—coming through was three parts luck,” said Harmon reflectively.

“That's true enough; yet there was this odd, deep-rooted persuasion in men's minds to the contrary, and no one ever found the bodies. I think what has troubled young Malmain was the idea that his father might have been lost for a time, and before his return may*have heard of Lady Malmain's second marriage, and when he found how he had been hurried out of the land of the living and the bars put up against him, may have just decided to stay out altogether.”

“So the boy's waited twelve years, and now he wants his father,” said Harmon, summing up the other's fable. “And where do you come in?” he asked abruptly.

“I met him at the club—in Montreal when I was East. They introduced me as 'the man who knows more of the great North-West, et cætera'—you know the kind of talk. I took a liking to the lad— and here we are.”

“It's a new character. I didn't know you were a sentimentalist, Semple.”

“Tm not; I'm paid for it.”

“Oh, you're paid for it, are you?”

Something in the inflection caught Leona Harmon's ear. She looked up from her knitting. “Clive!” she said.

“Yes, I'm paid for it, and paid well. Couldn't afford to go otherwise.”

“Does your young Englishman expect to interview his father's ghost? If that isn't his idea in coming to these parts, I confess I don't see what else he wants. The shade of the departed may hang round the fatal spot waiting to say its say; but he can't expect any living man to haunt the same place for a round dozen years. Why, even if he were alive—and it's a thousand to one he isn't—he'd be likely to choose some more luxurious climate than the great North-West—it's a rare taste, Semple, with the gold chucked in; and there wasn't any in his day, was there?”

“He knows all that,” said Semple, emptying his pipe; “but there's no telling where the trail will lead. His object in wanting to retrace the old one was just to pick up a clue or two if he could.... He's going to show the photograph to some of the old-timers.”

“Photograph? There is a photograph?”

“Yes, there are several. Of course, twelve years of roughing it makes a big difference. Young Malmain has a picture of the guide, Lajimonière, too, that he got out of Skeene's book. The guide is my stumbling-block—it would take a good deal of inducement to prevail upon a guide like Lajimonière to drop out of sight and give up his profession.”

“Oh, sentiment may have entered into it as well as money—as it does with you.”

“You may sneer, Harmon, but in a country like this, where we're all little men fighting with our naked hands this great white foe, where every man's life is in his brother's keeping, sentiment means more than gold. Men have frozen solid clutching Klondike nuggets in their pockets. We give our lives; in the cities men only sell them. If we didn't keep our hearts warm, my God, man, we'd turn to ice. And look at you! If sentiment didn't mean more than money, would you be here now?”

Clive Harmon rose, knocked the tobacco out of the bowl of his pipe against the chimney-ledge, and faced round on Semple. His voice was hard with some deep rooted resentment.

“You may as well understand my attitude—so here it is,” he began. “If the man's dead, as I said before, he's very dead indeed; there'll not be much of him left to take home and put in the family vault. If he's alive, is a man never to be allowed to cut away from the past—is it to be hung round his neck for ever? Has this earth any freedom, any man-room on it, or is it a damned little penitential purgatory, like the parsons preach? If some poor wretch has managed to get away and cut his life by the pattern he made himself, and be happy in doing it, why the hell must you and the rest of the world he's chosen to die to, get to baying on his track and hound him back again? It's his choice; he has a right to make it—what the devil business is it of yours? Tell your Malmain boy to go back where he came from and find himself some other sport—that's what I say.”

“I've told you where I come in, Harmon. As for Malcolm Malmain, a man doesn't cross the ocean and travel a thousand miles to be told he'd better have stayed where he was. Its rather late for that. Besides, doesn't it occur to you that a son has some rights—added to his natural interest in his father's existence?”

“The law has given him his rights of inheritance; he has the title. And does it occur to you that it will be deuced awkward for his mother if his father should turn up again? She'll be the mistress of the man she's living with, and her children will be illegitimate.”

“It has occurred to Malcolm, you may be sure. He could scarcely overlook a point as vital as that. But he has discounted it. I know that his mother opposed his coming; not that she thinks there's much danger of his finding his father, I fancy, but that it recalls her somewhat hasty marriage and looks awkward for her. What he told me was that it made her apprehensive, and revived painful memories. So far as the legality of the second marriage is concerned, I suppose, taking into consideration the peculiar circumstances, something might be arranged—I don't know”

“Which doesn't change things so far as the children go.”

“But you don't know,” Leona Harmon interposed, speaking almost for the first time—“you don't know the harm you may be doing somebody else. You're trying to help this young man find his father, and that's very commendable in you. In you and in him. I understand he's lonely now; youth often is lonely. But he may marry soon—his life will fill up. While the older man, Lord Malmain—if he were to go- back now he would find everything strange and changed. He'd be as lonely as a ghost come back from the grave. 3esides, you don't know”—she spoke a little eagerly, as if she were pleading a cause—“you don't know what new ties he may have formed. Are you going to uproot them? There may be other claims on him now beside his son's claim. His life couldn't stay empty, couldn't stand still just where it was. You can't know these things. You've no right to decide.”

Semple answered her: “Of course I've no right. I've no intention of trying to decide. Only I thought that, perhaps, the man might like to know of his son's search for him—then, when he knew, the choice would rest with him. The most I could do would be to lay the case before him. It would be for him to decide.”

There was a moment's silence. Nobody spoke until Semple said, “If you'll pardon me, I'll turn in now. It's the rule, you know, when you're mushing twenty miles a day. You keep the sun's hours—that is, the sun's hours in the blessed countries where they have a sun.”

“Would you mind,” Leona Harmon said, when Semple had left them for the night, “if we went outside to talk instead of talking here?”

A little way down the slope from the cabin door was a boulder which the action of the rains and the frosts and the snows had laboured through centuries to hollow into seats. There they had often sat to watch the winter march across the land, or the swift, relieving forces of spring. Already the first crystalline cold of autumn began to shiver in the air. An aurora, paler, more delicate than those of winter, with the hues of wood violets and anemones and alpine rose upon its tremulous wings—a spirit of springs that had died young in this unvernal land, immortalised in its skies, hung over their heads. Even in the absorption of her mood she noted it. When, in winter, over the white silence of the earth violent skies beat with the pulse of passion and throbbed with a thousand throes, night after night she warmed herself at those vital and tingling heavens. They were the only thing that kept her from surrendering to the vast usurpation of terrestrial death. The zoned arc that bent above the snows—she had seen it waver and sink as if with the doom of gods, while, from the horizon, the ranked spears and pennants of fire streamed up and stormed the zenith with the onset of triumphing hosts. Countless banners tossed there in the heart of that aerial fray; it seemed one heard in the brittle air the shivering of lance against lance, and colours like the call of trumpets thrilled through sidereal space: fierce crimsons throbbed like drums, deep purples unrolled their mournful lengths like lonely bugle calls. But to-night the softer summer heavens were filled with subtler palpitations; a flush illusive as awakening love suffused the sky, and the seven veils of colour were shaken as a dancer's draperies across its vault.

“The aurora,” she said, with perfunctory comment, and then: “You did Semple an injustice—he will not betray you.”

“How did you know?”

“1 knew almost at once; almost as soon as he began to speak. There were many clues I could go back and pick up, But we were to be absolutely frank with each other, and you have deceived me, Clive—all these years you have deceived me.”

“How have I deceived you?” he asked.

“You never told me there was a child. You hid that from me.”

“What difference could that make?”

“You are a man or you couldn't ask that. To a woman, all the difference in the world. You weren't free to stay here—you had given a hostage.”

“I didn't think of him as my child.”

“Ah—h—h!” she breathed.

“No, not that. I don't mean that. Don't misunderstand me. He's my son. I never doubted that; I never had any reason to doubt her until those last two hellish years. She loved pleasure, but there was nothing worse. But when she and I began to grow apart she took possession of the child. He was hers—she took that attitude. Not that she was so devoted to the boy—she never was the maternal type—but that it gave her pleasure to shut me out. I acquiesced—it has always seemed to me that children belong more to the mother, When I came away he was a little chap at school. I didn't know much about him; my one parental obligation was to see that he got his name without any smirch on it; and the only way I could do that was to give his mother her freedom outside of the divorce courts. I've a prejudice against suicide—it's cowardly; besides, I wasn't quite through with life—I knew there were many better ways of living it than those I had tried—and so I simply dropped out. I'm not sure about new life and reincarnations hereafter, and I thought I'd make my own.”

“So it was really for the boy's sake that you came, after all.”

“No, you can't say that; partly for his and partly for my own. I was sick of it all, and bitter and cynical, but I didn't want a dirty divorce-court mess—didn't want to kill a man when it wasn't all his fault—didn't wish a scandal on my own account, and on my son's, and on my father's, and my father's father's. I didn't wish to be the one to bring a blot into the scutcheon. So I cleared out, and God knows I've had my reward—for I met you.”

She smiled bitterly. “A woman who had dropped out too. Thank God I had no sons to think of! And now the world has caught up with us both. There's only one way you can really escape it, and that is to put the river of death between you—an actual death—that's the only kind that will save you. I've always told you that some day the world would find us again and smoke us out like foxes out of their holes.”

“It hasn't found us. Semple has only told us a story about a man who disappeared. To-morrow he'll join his friend, and they will continue their journey and go after moose. There's an end of it—it makes no difference at all.”

“It makes no difference!” Again she laughed. “You can stand there and lie to me very loyally, but don't you know that I know the yearning in your heart to see the face of your son—with his picture there this minute against your breast?”

He started violently.

“How do you know that?” he asked, for the second time that night.

“Because, when Semple began telling us, I kept wondering at first where I had heard the name and what association I had with it, and then I remembered a packet of papers that came last year, and one of them spoke of this young Lord Malmain, and said he was going to the North-West to examine the country where his father had been killed, and see if he could find any traces of him; and I remembered your face when you found me reading the paragraph, and I called your attention to it; and afterwards, when I picked up the paper, the picture—his picture—had been cut out.”

“And you knew then?”

“No, I didn't know then—I didn't know until to-night. I wondered. But to-night, while Semple was talking, I went back and picked up other links. The initial on the sleeve buttons, the copy of Montaigne with the book-plate scratched out”

“You can't deceive a woman.”

“Why should you wish to deceive me? We have been very close to each other, as close as ever man and woman were since the garden of Eden, as absolutely alone. Now we must let others in. He must come here to-morrow. You must fetch him.”

“I shall not bring him,” he said; “it would make it worse for both of us.”

“Do you think I will accept such a sacrifice?”

“It's not a sacrifice. I would not go back, even if there were no you. England is the 'Valley of Dry Bones' to me now. To go back would mean humiliation to others and misery to myself. I have done with it all—the man I was is dead.”

“Whether you go or not, he must come here. He must not have his search in vain.”

“I would rather not. There are reasons”

“You mean me. I am the reason.”

“It would be awkward for you,” he acknowledged.

“The world has rushed in with a vengeance when we begin to consider conventions, Clive!”

“Can you be ready to start at daybreak to-morrow?” he asked abruptly.

“Start? Start where?”

“We are going on a little trip. You are right; it's better that Malcolm should come here, and less likely to excite suspicion. I've thought it out while we've been talking. To-morrow we'll go away for a few days, down the river, and Semple can bring my son here and offer him the hospitality of the shack. I shouldn't like him to be turned away from my door. Semple will explain that he found us gone on a camping trip, and when they've left we'll return.”

For a long time they argued back and forth, the woman pleading against her own interests; but she was unable to break his resolution. In the morning he saw Semple and had a talk with him, and, two hours after Semple had set out for his camp on the river, they were well on their own way. They were not going far—a matter of some fifteen miles, to put the ridge between them and the cabin—and they took only a few tins and a small sleeping-tent.

On the third day they returned. From the moment they climbed the spurs of the home range and the house came in sight, each scanned it furtively with that involuntary impulse a man has to search in the impassive face of nature for some cognisance of crucial changes in his own story. And presently Harmon became aware of a certain tensity in his companion's bearing.

“Why are you watching the house, Leona? You look almost as if you expected to see somebody. Hullo”—his hand dropped to the horn slung at his side—“I forgot to give Laurent the call.”

“Don't blow it, Clive. I'd rather not—not yet.”

They pushed open the cabin-door and entered in silence. Leona's glance swept the interior, penetrated the dark corners—no one there—nothing changed. Harmon passed into the bedroom, and she heard him throw his pack on the floor. She loosened the straps of the light load she carried and let it slip from her shoulders. “Strange,” she murmured, “strange!” Harmon strode in again, and threw open the heavy wooden shutters that protected the large window of the living-room. The light revealed to her ranging eyes the tobacco-jar on the chimney ledge, and the folded white paper that lay under it.

“So that was why,” she said. “That was why! He never got it!”

“Never got what?” Harmon asked in surprise.

“Never got the letter I wrote him. I can't understand—I put it under the tobacco-jar so that they couldn't fail to see it.”

“Wrote—wrote to whom?”

“To Malcolm Malmain. Oh,” she exclaimed, “of course, I see: it's an answer!”

She had already broken the seal. She ran through it, and held it out to him.

“Wait a moment. Would you mind telling me first what you wrote to Malcolm?”

“I wrote him that it was his father who lived here. That you had gone away to avoid meeting him, because there were reasons why you thought it best, but that he must wait for you until you came back. That, no matter what Semple said, he must be sure to wait; that you yearn for him as much as he does for you.... And yet, after all, he has let Semple persuade him!”

“So you had your way, in spite of me, Leona?”

“No, no, I didn't have my way. I did what was right. Read it.”

“Dear Madam,” he read, “I have no words to say how good it was of you to leave this note telling me about my father. You will pardon me for saying that I know it cost you something to write it. I have talked with Semple, and he has made me see a good many things. I see that it can never be England again for my father. He belongs here, and he belongs to you far more than he does to me. I did not take into consideration how entirely he might have made a new life for himself over here. I have no right to come and find him if he doesn't wish to be found. I have no right to force the choice upon him a second time when he has already chosen. But I thank you just as much. You have taken a great weight from my heart. Even though I never see my father, never look into his face or touch his hand, I shall not feel the cold and loneliness and the dreadful uncertainty. I shall not shiver when I hear the North wind blow. I shall know he is content. That is a great deal. But in spite of what you so kindly write, I can't stay here to wait for my father's return, when I have driven him out of his house to avoid meeting me. I can't put Semple in such a position, because he feels that he brought the whole thing about. So we are going away this afternoon to hunt moose on Gimlet Creek. We shall be in that part of the country for two or three weeks, and when I go back to England I shall carry a lighter heart and a grateful remembrance of you.”

Harmon read it all to the clear signature, “Malcolm Malmain,” at the end. He crumpled the paper in his hand. “A gentleman,” he said, under his breath,

Leona caught the word, and for a passing instant her face revealed its sacrament; in her lit gaze candles burned to him, incense rose, love was lifted up, and she, its postulant, bowed before it, in one of those rare moments when the heart celebrates its worship—the elevation of its host.

“Your son, Clive,” she said.

He strode to the back-dcor.

“Laurent! Laurent!” he shouted.

The half-breed came running, grinning with pleasure. “Welcome, Monsieur; welcome, Madame! When you geet back, eh? Strangère gone.”

“Laurent, you know the Gimlet Creek country? Where we hunted with Mr. Semple two years ago? You and I start for it by noon. Get the guns and things ready—for the two of us.”

“Jus' you an' me? Madame she not go?”

Leona smiled. “Not this time, Laurent, not this time,” she said.