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Northern Lights, Volume 2. by Gilbert Parker
page 48 of 96 (50%)
who it was that called; or was it that even in the one word uttered there
was the note of a voice always remembered since those days with Manette
at Winnipeg?

Not far away from the house, on the way to Portage la Drome, but a little
distance from the road, was a crevasse, and towards this she sped, for
once before an accident had happened there. Again the voice called as
she sped--"Pauline!" and she cried out that she was coming. Presently
she stood above the declivity, and peered over. Almost immediately below
her, a few feet down, was a man lying in the snow. He had strayed from
the obliterated road, and had fallen down the crevasse, twisting his foot
cruelly. Unable to walk he had crawled several hundred yards in the
snow, but his strength had given out, and then he had called to the
house, on whose dark windows flickered the flames of the fire, the name
of the girl he had come so far to see. With a cry of joy and pain at
once she recognised him now. It was as her heart had said--it was
Julien, Manette's brother. In a moment she was beside him, her arm
around his shoulder.

"Pauline!" he said feebly, and fainted in her arms. An instant later
she was speeding to the house, and, rousing her mother and two of the
stablemen, she snatched a flask of brandy from a cupboard and hastened
back.

An hour later Julien Labrosse lay in the great sitting-room beside the
fire, his foot and ankle bandaged, and at ease, his face alight with all
that had brought him there. And once again the Indian mother with a sure
instinct knew why he had come, and saw that now her girl would have a
white woman's home, and, for her man, one of the race like her father's
race, white and conquering.
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