ase,
until I turn you over to the Rivers. And you are not going tonight. You
shall wait here for Laselle and his brigade."

"Laselle--Jean Laselle?"

She nodded. "Yes, that is why you must wait. We have made a splendid
arrangement. When Laselle and his brigade start north, you go with
them. And no one will ever know. You are safe here. No one will think
of looking for you under the roof of the Inspector of Police."

"But you, Marette!" He caught himself, remembering her injunction not
to question her. Marette shrugged her slim shoulders the slightest bit
and nodded for him to look upon what she knew he had already seen, her
room.

"It is not uncomfortable," she said. "I have been here for a number of
weeks, and nothing has happened to me. I am quite safe. Inspector
Kedsty has not looked inside that door since the day your big
red-headed friend saw me down in the poplars. He has not put a foot on
the stair. That is the dead-line. And--I know--you are wondering. You
are asking yourself a great many questions--_a bon droit_, M'sieu Jeems.
You are burning up with them. I can see it. And I--"

There was something suddenly pathetic about her, as she sank into the
big-armed, upholstered chair which had been Kedsty's favorite reading
chair. She was tired, and for a moment it seemed to Kent that she was
almost ready to cry. Her ringers twisted nervously at the shining end
of the braid in her lap, and more than ever he thought how slim and
helpless, she was, yet how gloriously unafraid, how unconquerable with
that something within her that burned like the fire of a dynamo. The
flame of that force had gone down now, as though the fire itself was
dying out; but when she raised her eyes to him, looking up at him from
out of the big chair, he knew that back of the yearning, child-like
glow that lay in them the heart of that fire was living and
unquenchable. Again, for him, she had ceased to be a woman. It was the
soul of a child that lay in her wide-open, wonderfully blue eyes. Twice
before he had seen that miracle, and it held him now, as it had held
him that first time when she had stood with her back at Cardigan's
door. And as it had changed then, so it changed now, slowly, and she
was a woman again, with that great gulf of unapproachableness between
them. But the yearning was still there, revealing itself to him, and
yet, like the sun, infinitely remote from him.

"I wish that I might answer those questions for you," she s