e heard them
sobbing and moaning like human souls writhing in agony--"

Father Charles paused, to peer through the window out into the black
night, where the pine-trees were sobbing and moaning now. When he
turned, Forsythe, the timber agent, whose life was a wilderness life,
nodded understandingly.

"And when they cry like that," went on Father Charles, "a living voice
would be lost among them as the splash of a pebble is lost in the
roaring sea. A hundred times that night I fancied that I heard human
voices; and a dozen times I went to my door, drew back the bolt, and
listened, with the snow and the wind beating about my ears.

"As I sat shuddering before my fire, there came a thought to me of a
story which I had long ago read about the sea--a story of impossible
achievement and of impossible heroism. As vividly as if I had read it
only the day before, I recalled the description of a wild and stormy
night when the heroine placed a lighted lamp in the window of her
sea-bound cottage, to guide her lover home in safety. Gentlemen, the
reading of that book in my boyhood days was but a trivial thing. I had
read a thousand others, and of them all it was possibly the least
significant; but the Supreme Arbiter had not forgotten.

"The memory of that book brought me to my feet, and I placed a lighted
lamp close up against my cabin window. Fifteen minutes later I heard a
strange sound at the door, and when I opened it there fell in upon the
floor at my feet a young and beautiful woman. And after her, dragging
himself over the threshold on his hands and knees, there came a man.

"I closed the door, after the man had crawled in and fallen face
downward upon the floor, and turned my attention first to the woman.
She was covered with snow. Her long, beautiful hair was loose and
disheveled, and had blown about her like a veil. Her big, dark eyes
looked at me pleadingly, and in them there was a terror such as I had
never beheld in human eyes before. I bent over her, intending to carry
her to my cot; but in another moment she had thrown herself upon the
prostrate form of the man, with her arms about his head, and there
burst from her lips the first sounds that she had uttered. They were
not much more intelligible than the wailing grief of the pine-trees out
in the night, but they told me plainly enough that the man on the floor
was dearer to her than life.

"I knelt beside him, and found that he was breathing in a quick,
pantin