ed himself.

"Valerie," he murmured.

An instant afterward she entered the room with the priest. She was dressed
in a severely simple suit of gray, which set off to advantage her slim,
graceful figure. There seemed no reason why she should have been called
the little widow of Jansen, for she was not small, but she was very finely
and delicately made, and the name had been but an expression of Jansen's
paternal feeling for her. She had always had a good deal of fresh color,
but to-day she seemed pale, though her eyes had a strange disturbing
light. It was not that they brightened on seeing this man before her; they
had been brighter, burningly bright, when she left the hospital, where,
since it had been built, she had been the one visitor of authority--Jansen
had given her that honor. She had a gift of smiling, and she smiled now,
but it came from grace of mind rather than from humor. As Finden had said,
"She was forever acting, and never doin' any harm by it."

Certainly she was doing no harm by it now; nevertheless, it was acting.
Could it be otherwise, with what was behind her life--a husband who had
ruined her youth, had committed homicide, had escaped capture, but who had
not subsequently died, as the world believed he had done, so
circumstantial was the evidence. He was not man enough to make the
accepted belief in his death a fact. What could she do but act, since the
day she got a letter from the Far North, which took her out to Jansen,
nominally to nurse those stricken with smallpox under Father Bourassa's
care, actually to be where her wretched husband could come to her once a
year, as he had asked with an impossible selfishness?

Each year she had seen him for an hour or less, giving him money, speaking
to him over a gulf so wide that it seemed sometimes as though her voice
could not be heard across it; each year opening a grave to look at the
embalmed face of one who had long since died in shame, which only brought
back the cruellest of all memories, that which one would give one's best
years to forget. With a fortitude beyond description she had faced it,
gently, quietly, but firmly faced it--firmly, because she had to be firm
in keeping him within those bounds the invasion of which would have killed
her. And after the first struggle with his unchangeable brutality it had
been easier: for into his degenerate brain there had come a faint
understanding of the real situation and of her. He had kept his side o