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“He will die unless the surgeon’s knife it cure him before twenty-four hours, and–“

“And Doctor Brydon is sick, and Doctor Hadley away at Winnipeg, and this is two hundred miles from nowhere! It looks as if the police’ll never get him, eh?”

“You have not tell any one–never?”

Finden laughed. “Though I’m not a priest, I can lock myself up as tight as anny. There’s no tongue that’s so tied, when tying’s needed, as the one that babbles most bewhiles. Babbling covers a lot of secrets.”

“So you t’ink it better Meydon should die, as Hadley is away and Brydon is sick–hein?“

“Oh, I think–“

Finden stopped short, for a horse’s hoofs sounded on the turf beside the house, and presently Varley, the great London surgeon, rounded the corner and stopped his horse in front of the veranda.

He lifted his hat to the priest. “I hear there’s a bad case at the hospital,” he said.

“It is ver’ dangerous,” answered Father Bourassa; “but, voila, come in! There is something cool to drink. Ah, yes, he is ver’ bad, that man from the Great Slave Lake.”

Inside the house, with the cooling drinks, Varley pressed his questions, and presently, much interested, told at some length of singular cases which had passed through his hands–one a man with his neck broken, who had lived for six months afterward.

“Broken as a man’s neck is broken by hanging–dislocation, really–the disjointing of the medulla oblongata, if you don’t mind technicalities,” he said. “But I kept him living just the same. Time enough for him to repent in and get ready to go. A most interesting case. He was a criminal, too, and wanted to die; but you have to keep life going if you can, to the last inch of resistance.”

The priest looked thoughtfully out of the window; Finden’s eyes were screwed up in a questioning way, but neither made any response to Varley’s remarks. There was a long minute’s silence. They were all three roused by hearing a light footstep on the veranda.

Father Bourassa put down his glass and hastened into the hallway. Finden caught a glimpse of a woman’s figure, and, without a word, passed abruptly from the dining-room, where they were, into the priest’s study, leaving Varley alone. Varley turned to look after him, stared, and shrugged his shoulders.

“The manners of the West,” he said, good-humoredly, and turned again to the hallway, from whence came the sound of the priest’s voice. Presently there was another voice–a woman’s. He flushed slightly and involuntarily straightened himself.

“Valerie,” he murmured.

An instant afterward she entered the room with the priest. She was dressed in a severely simple suit of gray, which set off to advantage her slim, graceful figure. There seemed no reason why she should have been called the little widow of Jansen, for she was not small, but she was very finely and delicately made, and the name had been but an expression of Jansen’s paternal feeling for her. She had always had a good deal of fresh color, but to-day she seemed pale, though her eyes had a strange disturbing light. It was not that they brightened on seeing this man before her; they had been brighter, burningly bright, when she left the hospital, where, since it had been built, she had been the one visitor of authority–Jansen had given her that honor. She had a gift of smiling, and she smiled now, but it came from grace of mind rather than from humor. As Finden had said, “She was forever acting, and never doin’ any harm by it.”

Certainly she was doing no harm by it now; nevertheless, it was acting. Could it be otherwise, with what was behind her life–a husband who had ruined her youth, had committed homicide, had escaped capture, but who had not subsequently died, as the world believed he had done, so circumstantial was the evidence. He was not man enough to make the accepted belief in his death a fact. What could she do but act, since the day she got a letter from the Far North, which took her out to Jansen, nominally to nurse those stricken with smallpox under Father Bourassa’s care, actually to be where her wretched husband could come to her once a year, as he had asked with an impossible selfishness?