.
Finden caught a glimpse of a woman's figure, and, without a word, passed
abruptly from the dining-room where they were, into the priest's study,
leaving Varley alone. Varley turned to look after him, stared, and
shrugged his shoulders.

"The manners of the West," he said good-humouredly, and turned again to
the hallway, from whence came the sound of the priest's voice.
Presently there was another voice--a woman's. He flushed slightly and
involuntarily straightened himself.

"Valerie," he murmured.

An instant afterwards she entered the room with the priest. She was
dressed in a severely simple suit of grey, 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 colour, 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 honour. She had
a gift of smiling, and she smiled now, but it came from grace of mind
rather than from humour. As Finden had said, "She was for ever 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 al