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Finden flushed, then burst into a laugh. “I’d almost forgotten I was one of them–the first almost. Blessed be he that expects nothing, for he’ll get it sure. It was my duty, and I did it. Was she to feel that Jansen did not price her high? Bedad, father, I rose betimes and did it, before anny man should say he set me the lead. Before the carpet in the parlor was down, and with the bare boards soundin’ to my words, I offered her the name of Finden.”

“And so–the first of the long line! Bien, it is an honor.” The priest paused a moment, looked at Finden with a curious reflective look, and then said, “And so you t’ink there is no one; that she will say yes not at all–no?”

They were sitting on Father Bourassa’s verandah, on the outskirts of the town, above the great river, along which had travelled millions of bygone people, fighting, roaming, hunting, trapping; and they could hear it rushing past, see the swirling eddies, the impetuous currents, the occasional rafts moving majestically down the stream. They were facing the wild North, while civilization was hacking and hewing and ploughing its way to newer and newer cities, in an empire ever spreading to the Pole.

Finden’s glance loitered on this scene before he replied. At length, screwing up one eye, and with a suggestive smile, he answered: “Sure, it’s all a matter of time, to the selfishest woman. ‘Tis not the same with women as with men; you see, they don’t get younger–that’s a point. But”–he gave a meaning glance at the priest–“but perhaps she’s not going to wait for that, after all. And there he rides, a fine figure of a man, too, if I have to say it!”

“M’sieu’ Varley?” the priest responded, and watched a galloping horseman to whom Finden had pointed till he rounded a corner of a little wood.

“Varley, the great London surgeon, sure! Say, father, it’s a hundred to one she’d take him if–“

There was a curious look in Father Bourassa’s face, a cloud in his eyes. He sighed. “London, it is ver’ far away,” he remarked, obliquely.

“What’s to that? If she is with the right man, near or far is nothing.”

“So far–from home,” said the priest, reflectively, but his eyes furtively watched the other’s face.

“But home’s where man and wife are.”

The priest now looked him straight in the eyes. “Then, as you say, she will not marry M’sieu’ Varley–hein?“

The humor died out of Finden’s face. His eyes met the priest’s eyes steadily. “Did I say that? Then my tongue wasn’t making a fool of me, after all. How did you guess I knew–everything, father?”

“A priest knows many t’ings–so.”

There was a moment of gloom, then the Irishman brightened. He came straight to the heart of the mystery around which they had been manoeuvring. “Have you seen her husband–Meydon–this year? It isn’t his usual time to come yet.”

Father Bourassa’s eyes drew those of his friend into the light of a new understanding and revelation. They understood and trusted each other.

“Helas! He is there in the hospital,” he answered, and nodded toward a building not far away, which had been part of an old Hudson Bay Company’s fort. It had been hastily adapted as a hospital for the smallpox victims.

“Oh, it’s Meydon, is it, that bad case I heard of to-day?”

The priest nodded again and pointed. “Voila, Madame Meydon, she is coming. She has seen him–her hoosban’.”

Finden’s eyes followed the gesture. The little widow of Jansen was coming from the hospital, walking slowly toward the river.

“As purty a woman, too–as purty and as straight bewhiles. What is the matter with him–with Meydon?” Finden asked, after a moment.

“An accident in the woods–so. He arrive, it is las’ night, from Great Slave Lake.”

Finden sighed. “Ten years ago he was a man to look at twice–before he did It and got away. Now his own mother wouldn’t know him–bad ‘cess to him! I knew him from the cradle almost. I spotted him here by a knife-cut I gave him in the hand when we were lads together. A divil of a timper always both of us had, but the good-nature was with me, and I didn’t drink and gamble and carry a pistol. It’s ten years since he did the killing, down in Quebec, and I don’t suppose the police will get him now. He’s been counted dead. I recognized him here the night after I asked her how she liked the name of Finden. She doesn’t know that I ever knew him. And he didn’t recognize me–twenty-five years since we met before! It would be better if he went under the sod. Is he pretty sick, father?”