But the man appeared not to hear; he was still on his knees.

Tim faced the woods once more.

He was about to mount his horse when he heard a step behind him. He turned sharply--and faced Laura.

"I couldn't rest. I came out this morning. I've seen everything," she said.

"You didn't trust me," he said, heavily.

"I never did anything else," she answered.

He gazed half-fearfully into her eyes. "Well?" he asked. "I've done my best, as I said I would."

"Tim," she said, and slipped a hand in his, "would you mind the religion--if you had me?"

THE LITTLE WIDOW OF JANSEN

Her advent to Jansen was propitious. Smallpox in its most virulent form had broken out in the French-Canadian portion of the town, and, coming with some professional nurses from the East, herself an amateur, to attend the sufferers, she worked with such skill and devotion that the official thanks of the Corporation were offered her, together with a tiny gold watch, the gift of grateful citizens. But she still remained on at Jansen, saying always, however, that she was "going East in the spring."

Five years had pa.s.sed, and still she had not gone East, but remained perched in the rooms she had first taken, over the Imperial Bank, while the town grew up swiftly round her. And even when the young bank manager married, and wished to take over the rooms, she sent him to the right-about from his own premises in her gay, masterful way. The young manager behaved well in the circ.u.mstances, because he had asked her to marry him, and she had dismissed him with a warning against challenging his own happiness--that was the way she had put it. Perhaps he was galled the less because others had striven for the same prize, and had been thrust back, with an almost tender misgiving as to their sense of self-preservation and sanity. Some of them were eligible enough, and all were of some position in the West. Yet she smiled them firmly away, to the wonder of Jansen, and to its satisfaction, for was it not a tribute to all that she would distinguish no particular unit by her permanent favor? But for one so sprightly and almost frivolous in manner at times, the self-denial seemed incongruous. She was unconventional enough to sit on the sidewalk with a half-dozen children round her blowing bubbles, or to romp in any garden, or in the street, playing Puss-in-the-ring; yet this only made her more popular. Jansen's admiration was at its highest, however, when she rode in the annual steeplechase with the best hors.e.m.e.n of the province. She had the gift of doing as well as of being.

"'Tis the light heart she has, and slippin' in and out of things like a hummin'-bird, no easier to ketch and no longer to stay," said Finden, the rich Irish landbroker, suggestively to Father Boura.s.sa, the huge French-Canadian priest who had worked with her through all the dark weeks of the smallpox epidemic, and who knew what lay beneath the outer gayety.

She had been buoyant of spirit beside the beds of the sick, and her words were full of raillery and humor, yet there was ever a gentle note behind all; and the priest had seen her eyes shining with tears as she bent over some stricken sufferer bound upon an interminable journey.

"Bedad! as bright a little spark as ever struck off the steel," added Finden to the priest, with a sidelong, inquisitive look, "but a heart no bigger than a marrowfat pea--selfishness, all self. Keepin' herself for herself when there's many a good man needin' her. Mother o' Moses, how many! From Terry O'Ryan, brother of a peer, at Latouche, to Bernard Bapty, son of a millionaire, at Vancouver, there's a string o' them. All pride and self; and as fair a lot they've been as ever entered for the Marriage Cup. Now isn't that so, father?"

Finden's brogue did not come from a plebeian origin. It was part of his commercial equipment, an a.s.set of his boyhood spent among the peasants on the family estate in Galway.

Father Boura.s.sa fanned himself with the black broadbrim hat he wore, and looked benignly but quizzically on the wiry, sharp-faced Irishman.

"You t'ink her heart is leetla. But perhaps it is your mind is not so big enough to see--_hien_?" The priest laughed noiselessly, showing white teeth. "Was it so selfish in Madame to refuse the name of Finden--_n'est-ce pas_?"

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 Boura.s.sa'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, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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 Boura.s.sa'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 Boura.s.sa's eyes drew those of his friend into the light of a new understanding and revelation. They understood and trusted each other.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "AS PURTY A WOMAN, TOO--AS PURTY AND AS STRAIGHT BEWHILES"]

"_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?"

"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.