blue veins showing painfully dark on the temples and forehead, at the
firm little white hand, which was as brown as a butternut a few weeks
before. The longer he sat, the deeper did his misery sink into his soul.
His wife had gone, he knew not where, his child was wasting to death, and
he had for his sorrows no inner consolation. He had ever had that touch
of mystical imagination inseparable from the far north, yet he had none
of that religious belief which swallowed up natural awe and turned it to
the refining of life, and to the advantage of a man's soul. Now it was
forced in upon him that his child was wiser than himself, wiser and
safer. His life had been spent in the wastes, with rough deeds and rugged
habits, and a youth of hardship, danger, and almost savage endurance, had
given him a half-barbarian temperament, which could strike an angry blow
at one moment and fondle to death at the next.

When he married sweet Lucette Barbond his religion reached little farther
than a belief in the Scarlet Hunter of the Kimash Hills and those voices
that could be heard calling in the night, till their time of sleep be
past, and they should rise and reconquer the north.

Not even Father Corraine, whose ways were like those of his Master, could
ever bring him to a more definite faith. His wife had at first striven
with him, mourning yet loving. Sometimes the savage in him had broken out
over the little creature, merely because barbaric tyranny was in
him--torture followed by the passionate kiss. But how was she philosopher
enough to understand the cause?

When she fled from their hut one bitter day, as he roared some wild words
at her, it was because her nerves had all been shaken from threatened
death by wild beasts (of which he did not know), and his violence drove
her mad. She had run out of the house, and on, and on, and on--and she