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“Quite. I know all that; but it is no marriage.” He rose to his feet slowly, dropping the cigarette from his lips as he did so. “Yes,” he continued, “and I know that you prefer Shon McGann to Pretty Pierre.”

She spread out her hands appealingly.

“But you are my wife, not his. Listen: do you know what I shall do? I will tell you in two hours. It is now eight o’clock. At ten o’clock Shon McGann will meet me at the Saints’ Repose. Then you shall know…. Ah, it is a pity! Shon was my good friend, but this spoils all that. Wine–it has danger; cards–there is peril in that sport; women–they make trouble most of all.”

“O God,” she piteously said, “what did I do? There was no sin in me. I was your faithful wife, though you were cruel to me. You left me, cheated me, brought this upon me. It is you that has done this wickedness, not I.” She buried her face in her hands, falling on her knees beside the chair.

He bent above her: “You loved the young avocat better, eight years ago.”

She sprang to her feet. “Ah, now I understand,” she said. “That was why you quarrelled with me; why you deserted me. You were not man enough to say what made you so much the–so wicked and hard, so–“

“Be thankful, Lucy, that I did not kill you then,” he interjected.

“But it is a lie,” she cried; “a lie!”

She went to the door and called the Indian woman. “Ikni,” she said. “He dares to say evil of Andre and me. Think–of Andre!”

Ikni came to him, put her wrinkled face close to his, and said: “She was yours, only yours; but the spirits gave you a devil. Andre, oh, oh, Andre! The father of Andre was her father–ah, that makes your sulky eyes to open. Ikni knows how to speak. Ikni nursed them both. If you had waited you should have known. But you ran away like a wolf from a coal of fire; you shammed death like a fox; you come back like the snake to crawl into the house and strike with poison tooth, when you should be with the worms in the ground. But Ikni knows–you shall be struck with poison too, the Spirit of the Red Knife waits for you. Andre was her brother.”

He pushed her aside savagely: “Be still!” he said. “Get out-quick. ‘Sacre’–quick!”

When they were alone again he continued with no anger in his tone: “So, Andre the avocat and you–that, eh? Well, you see how much trouble has come; and now this other–a secret too. When were you married to Shon McGann?”

“Last night,” she bitterly replied; “a priest came over from the Indian village.”

“Last night,” he musingly repeated. “Last night I lost two thousand dollars at the Little Goshen field. I did not play well last night; I was nervous. In ten years I had not lost so much at one game as I did last night. It was a punishment for playing too honest, or something; eh, what do you think, Lucy–or something, ‘hein?'”

She said nothing, but rocked her body to and fro.

“Why did you not make known the marriage with Shon?”

“He was to have told it to-night,” she said.

There was silence for a moment, then a thought flashed into his eyes, and he rejoined with a jarring laugh, “Well, I will play a game to-night, Lucy Rives; such a game that Pretty Pierre will never be forgotten in the Pipi Valley–a beautiful game, just for two. And the other who will play–the wife of Francois Rives shall see if she will wait; but she must be patient, more patient than her husband was ten years ago.”

“What will you do–tell me, what will you do?”

“I will play a game of cards–just one magnificent game; and the cards shall settle it. All shall be quite fair, as when you and I played in the little house by the Chaudiere–at first, Lucy,–before I was a devil.”