of life runs, and he had closed his cabin and his forge, given his two
motherless girls to the wife of Jacques Baptiste, joined a party going
into the wilderness, and gone out of their lives.

Eleven years had passed with its varied life, at Grand Portage and he
had never returned,--only vague rumors that had sunk in tears the head
of gentle Marie, the younger of the two sisters, and lifted with
sympathetic understanding that of Maren the elder.

Why not? She had asked herself in the starlit nights of those years,
why not? All their lives he had been a good father to them, taking the
place of the mother dead since she could just remember, speeding with
tap and stroke of his humble craft those luckier ones who streamed
through the stirring headquarters of Grand Portage at the mouth of
Pigeon River each season, going into that untracked region of romance
and dreams where the call of his still sturdy manhood had beckoned
him,--how long none might know. And at last he had heeded, laid down
the staid, the sane, and followed the will-o'-the-wisp of conquest and
adventure that took the current by his door.

Never had Maren chided him,--never for one moment held against him the
desertion of his children. For that, they were well provided for since
he had left with Jacques Baptiste the savings of his life, not much,
but enough to bring both of them to the marriage age.

And well and tenderly had old Jacques and his wife fulfilled the
trust,--Maren's dark eyes were often misty as she recalled the parting
at Grand Portage.

So tenderly had the two maids grown in the love of the family that