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The priest took her wrist firmly in his. “These are not brave nor Christian words, from a brave and Christian girl. But I know that grief makes one’s words wild. Shon McGann shall be found. In the days when I saw him most and best, he talked of you as an angel gone, and he had never sought another woman had he known that you lived. The Mounted Police, the Riders of the Plains, travel far and wide. But now, there has come from the farther West a new detachment to Fort Cypress, and they may be able to help us. But listen. There is something more. The man Pretty Pierre, did he not speak puzzling words concerning himself and Shon McGann? And did he not say to you at the last that they were even now? Well, can you not guess?”

Mary Callen’s bosom heaved painfully and her eyes stared so at the candle in the window that they seemed to grow one with the flame. At last a new look crept into them; a thought made the lids close quickly as though it burned them. When they opened again they were full of tears that shone in the shadow and dropped slowly on her cheeks and flowed on and on, quivering too in her throat.

The priest said: “You understand, my child?”

And she answered: “I understand. Pierre, the outlaw, was her husband.”

Father Corraine rose and sat beside the table, his book of offices open before him. At length he said: “There is much that might be spoken; for the Church has words for every hour of man’s life, whatever it be; but there comes to me now a word to say, neither from prayer nor psalm, but from the songs of a country where good women are; where however poor the fireside, the loves beside it are born of the love of God, though the tongue be angry now and then, the foot stumble, and the hand quick at a blow.” Then, with a soft, ringing voice, he repeated:

“‘New friends will clasp your hand, dear, new faces on you smile–
You’ll bide with them and love them, but you’ll long for us the while;

For the word across the water, and the farewell by the stile–
For the true heart’s here, my darlin’.'”

Mary Callen’s tears flowed afresh at first; but soon after the voice ceased she closed her eyes and her sobs stopped, and Father Corraine sat down and became lost in thought as he watched the candle. Then there went a word among the spirits watching that he was not thinking of the candle, or of them that the candle was to light on the way, nor even of this girl near him, but of a summer forty years gone when he was a goodly youth, with the red on his lip and the light in his eye, and before him, leaning on a stile, was a lass with–

“… cheeks like the dawn of day.”

And all the good world swam in circles, eddying ever inward until it streamed intensely and joyously through her eyes “blue as the fairy flax.” And he had carried the remembrance of this away into the world with him, but had never gone back again. He had travelled beyond the seas to live among savages and wear out his life in self-denial; and now he had come to the evening of his life, a benignant figure in a lonely land. And as he sat here murmuring mechanically bits of an office, his heart and mind were with a sacred and distant past. Yet the spirits recorded both these things on their tablets, as though both were worthy of their remembrance.

He did not know that he kept repeating two sentences over and over to himself:

“‘Quoniam ipse liberavit me de laqueo venantium et a verbo aspero. Quoniam angelis suis mandavit de te: ut custodiant te in omnibus viis tuis.'”