grief. The changes of spring and summer, bringing with them all that
this desolate world held of warmth and beauty, filled him with the
excruciating pain of his great grief, as if the woman had died but
yesterday.

When he first saw the red flowers glowing upon her grave, he buried
his head in his arms and sobbed like a child. The woman had loved
them. She had always watched for the first red blooms to shoot up out
of the wet earth. A hundred times he had gone with her to search for
them, and had fastened the first flower in the soft beauty of her
hair. Those were the days when, like happy children, they had romped
and laughed together out there beyond the black spruce. Often he had
caught her up in his strong arms and carried her, tired and hungry but
gloriously happy, back to their little home in the clearing, where she
would sit and laugh at him as he clumsily prepared their supper.

Thoughts and pictures like these choked him and drove him off alone
into the depths of the wilderness. When this spirit impelled him his
moccasined feet would softly tread the paths they had taken in their
wanderings; and at every turn a new memory would spring up before him,
and he longed to fling himself down there with the sweet spirit of the
woman and die.

Little did he dream, at these times, that Jan and Melisse were to
cherish these same paths, that out of the old, dead joys there were to
spring new joys, and that the new joys were to wither and die, even as
his own--for a time. Beyond his own great sorrow he saw nothing in the
future. He gave up Melisse to Jan.

At last, his gaunt frame thinned by sleepless nights and days of