of the lover, no suggestion of the husband who cared deeply or
who might be made jealous by another man.

Sitting in darkness thickening with the nearer approach of storm, David
recalled the stab of pain mingled with humiliation that had come into
the eyes of St. Pierre's wife when she had stood facing her husband. He
heard again, with a new understanding, the low note of pathos in her
voice as in song she had called upon the Mother of Christ to hear
her--and help her. He had not guessed at the tragedy of it then. Now he
knew, and he thought of her lying awake in the gloom beyond the
bulkhead, her eyes were with tears. And St. Pierre had gone back to his
raft, singing in the night! Where before there had been sympathy for
him, there rose a sincere revulsion. There had been a reason for St.
Pierre's masterly possession of himself, and it had not been, as he had
thought, because of his bigness of soul. It was because he had not
cared. He was a splendid hypocrite, playing his game well at the
beginning, but betraying the lie at the end. He did not love Marie-Anne
as he, Dave Carrigan, loved her. He had spoken of her as a child, and
he had treated her as a child, and was serenely dispassionate in the
face of a situation which would have roused the spirit in most men. And
suddenly, recalling that thrilling hour in the white strip of sand and
all that had happened since, it flashed upon David that St. Pierre was
using his wife as the vital moving force in a game of his own--that
under the masquerade of his apparent faith and bigness of character he
was sacrificing her to achieve a certain mysterious something it the
scheme of his own affairs.

Yet he could not forget the infinite faith Marie-Anne Boulain had
expressed in her husband. There had been no hypocrisy in her waiting
and her watching for him, or in her belief that he would straighten out
the tangles of the dilemma in which she had become involved. Nor had
there been make-believe in the manner she had left him that day in her
eagerness to go to St. Pierre. Adding these facts as he had added the
others, he fancied he saw the truth staring at him out of the darkness
of his cabin room. Marie-Anne loved her husband. And St. Pierre was
merely the possessor, careless and indifferent, almost brutally
dispassionate in his consideration of her.

A heavy crash of thunder brought Carrigan back to a realization of the
impending storm. He rose to his feet in the chaotic gloom,