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Cheek to cheek they saw the darkness come, and afterwards the silver moon steal up over a frozen world, in which the air bit like steel and braced the heart like wine. Then, at last, before it was nine o’clock, after her custom, the Indian woman went to bed, leaving her daughter brooding peacefully by the fire.

For a long time Pauline sat with hands clasped in her lap, her gaze on the tossing flames, in her heart and mind a new feeling of strength and purpose. The way before her was not clear, she saw no further than this day, and all that it had brought; yet she was as one that has crossed a direful flood and finds herself on a strange shore in an unknown country, with the twilight about her, yet with so much of danger passed that there was only the thought of the moment’s safety round her, the camp-fire to be lit, and the bed to be made under the friendly trees and stars.

For a half-hour she sat so, and then, suddenly, she raised her head listening, leaning toward the window, through which the moonlight streamed. She heard her name called without, distinct and strange–“Pauline! Pauline!”

Starting up, she ran to the door and opened it. All was silent and cruelly cold. Nothing but the wide plain of snow and the steely air. But as she stood intently listening, the red glow from the fire behind her, again came the cry–“Pauline!”–not far away. Her heart beat hard, and she raised her head and called–why was it she should call out in a language not her own?–“Qu’appelle? Qu’appelle?”

And once again on the still night air came the trembling appeal, “Pauline!”

“Qu’appelle? Qu’appelle?” she cried; then, with a gasping murmur of understanding and recognition she ran forward in the frozen night toward the sound of the voice. The same intuitive sense which had made her call out in French, without thought or reason, had revealed to her 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 toward 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 recognized 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 man’s home, and, for her man, one of the race like her father’s race, white and conquering.

“I’m sorry to give trouble,” Julien said, laughing–he had a trick of laughing lightly; “but I’ll be able to get back to the Portage to-morrow.”