d 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 Bourassa'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,
screwing 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 Bourassa'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 ey