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“You wish to have her taken to the Fort, I suppose? What was she doing with Pretty Pierre?”

“I wish her taken to her home.”

“Where is her home, father?” And his eyes were cast with trouble on the girl, though he could assign no cause for that.

“Her home, Shon,”–the priest’s voice was very gentle–“her home was where they sing such words as these of a wanderer:

“‘You’ll hear the wild birds singin’ beneath a brighter sky,’
The roof-tree of your home, dear, it will be grand and high;
But you’ll hunger for the hearthstone where a child you used to lie,
You’ll be comin’ back, my darlin’.”‘

During these words Shon’s face ran white, then red; and now he stepped inside the door like one in a dream, and the girl’s face was lifted to his as though he had called her. “Mary–Mary Callen!” he cried. His arms spread out, then dropped to his side, and he fell on his knees by the table facing her, and looked at her with love and horror warring in his face; for the remembrance that she had been with Pierre was like the hand of the grave upon him. Moving not at all, she looked at him, a numb despondency in her face. Suddenly Shon’s look grew stern, and he was about to rise; but Father Corraine put a hand on his shoulder, and said: “Stay where you are, man–on your knees. There is your place just now. Be not so quick to judge, and remember your own sins before you charge others without knowledge. Listen now to me.”

And he spoke Mary Callen’s tale as he knew it, and as she had given it to him, not forgetting to mention that she had been told the thing which had occurred in Pipi Valley.

The heroic devotion of this woman, and Pretty Pierre’s act of friendship to her, together with the swift panorama of his past across the seas, awoke the whole man in Shon, as the staunch life that he had lately led rendered it possible. There was a grave, kind look upon his face when he rose at the ending of the tale, and came to her, saying:

“Mary, it is I who need forgiveness. Will you come now to the home you wanted”? and he stretched his arms to her….

An hour after, as the three sat there, the door of the other room opened, and Pretty Pierre came out silently, and was about to pass from the hut; but the priest put a hand on his arm, and said:

“‘Where do you go, Pierre?”

Pierre shrugged his shoulder slightly:

“I do not know. ‘Mon Dieu!’–that I have put this upon you!–you that never spoke but the truth.”

“You have made my sin of no avail,” the priest replied; and he motioned towards Shon McGann, who was now risen to his feet, Mary clinging to his arm. “Father Corraine,” said Shon, “it is my duty to arrest this man; but I cannot do it, would not do it, if he came and offered his arms for the steel. I’ll take the wrong of this now, sir, and such shame as there is in that falsehood on my shoulders. And she here and I, and this man too, I doubt not, will carry your sin–as you call it–to our graves, without shame.”

Father Corraine shook his head sadly, and made no reply, for his soul was heavy. He motioned them all to sit down. And they sat there by the light of a flickering candle, with the door bolted and a cassock hung across the window, lest by any chance this uncommon thing should be seen. But the priest remained in a shadowed corner, with a little book in his hand, and he was long on his knees. And when morning came they had neither slept nor changed the fashion of their watch, save for a moment now and then, when Pierre suffered from the pain of his wound, and silently passed up and down the little room.