"I do not know quite, but he said to me once, 'Gaston, you'll tell them
of me some day, and it will be a soft pillow for their heads! You can
mend a broken life, but the ring of it is gone.' I think he meant to
come back when I was about fourteen; but things happened, and he stayed."

There was a pause. Gaston seemed brooding, and Lady Belward said:

"Go on, please."

"There isn't so very much to tell. The life was the only one I had
known, and it was all right. But my father had told me of this life.
He taught me himself--he and Father Decluse and a Moravian missionary for
awhile. I knew some Latin and history, a bit of mathematics, a good deal
of astronomy, some French poets, and Shakespere. Shakespere is
wonderful. . . . My father wanted me to come here at once after he
died, but I knew better--I wanted to get sense first. So I took a place
in the Company. It wasn't all fun.

"I had to keep my wits sharp. I was only a youngster, and I had to do
with men as crafty and as silly as old Polonius. I was sent to Labrador.
That was not a life for a Christian. Once a year a ship comes to the
port, bringing the year's mail and news from the world. When you watch
that ship go out again, and you turn round and see the filthy Esquimaux
and Indians, and know that you've got to live for another year with them,
sit in their dirty tepees, eat their raw frozen meat, with an occasional
glut of pemmican, and the thermometer 70 degrees below zero, you get a
lump in your throat.

"Then came one winter. I had one white man, two half-breeds, and an