he
moon? Had she forgotten? COULD she forget? Or was she, as he thought
St. Pierre had painfully tried to make him believe, innocent of all the
thoughts and desires that had come to him, as he sat worshipping her in
their stolen hours? He could think of them only as stolen, for he did
not believe Marie-Anne had revealed to her husband all she might have
told him.

He was sure he would never see her again as he had seen her then, and
something of bitterness rose in him as he thought of that. St. Pierre,
could he have seen her face and eyes when he told her that her hair in
the moonlight was lovelier than anything he had ever seen, would have
throttled him with his naked hands in that meeting in the cabin. For
St. Pierre's code would not have had her eyes droop under their long
lashes or her cheeks flush so warmly at the words of another man--and
he could not take vengeance on the woman herself. No, she had not told
St. Pierre all she might have told! There were things which she must
have kept to herself, which she dared not reveal even to this
great-hearted man who was her husband. Shame, if nothing more, had kept
her silent.

Did she feel that shame as he was feeling it? It was inconceivable to
think otherwise. And for that reason, more than all others, he knew
that she would not meet him face to face again--unless he forced that
meeting. And there was little chance of that, for his pledge with St.
Pierre had eliminated her from the aftermath of tomorrow's drama, his
fight with Bateese. Only when St. Pierre might stand in a court of law
would there be a possibility of her eyes meeting his own again, and
then they would flame with the hatred that at another time had been in
the eyes of Carmin Fanchet.

With the dull stab of a thing that of late had been growing inside him,
he wondered what had happened to Carmin Fanchet in the years that had
gone since he had brought about the hanging of her brother. Last night
and the night before, strange dreams of her had come to him in restless
slumber. It was disturbing to him that he should wake up in the middle
of the night dreaming of her, when he had gone to his bed with a mind
filled to overflowing with the sweet presence of Marie-Anne Boulain.
And now his mind reached out poignantly into mysterious darkness and
doubt, even as the darkness of night spread itself in a thickening
canopy over the river.

Gray clouds had followed the sun of a faultless day, and the stars were