that she could never find out.

His decision being made, he acted upon it immediately, and that night
two letters, one addressed:

MONSIEUR PAUL ROGALLE,
de Rogalle, Dupont et Cie,
Paris, France,

and another:

M. JOSEF,
Faubourg Saint Honore,

were mailed by him at the neighboring posting-place of Pont du Coeur.

The morning after the writing of these letters Frank started farther
north, and heard nothing of the outside world for more than a month. At
North Point he found a bundle of letters, two from his mother, and
another from Doctor Johnston, enclosing the note which Katrine had
written him after her father's death.

He opened the doctor's first, and at sight of the enclosure his heart,
in the homely old phrase, came to his throat.

It was a sad letter, thanking the doctor for all he had tried to do,
speaking of her father's suffering at some length, parsimonious of
detail concerning her own life or future plans.

It was ten o'clock in the hunting-hutch. The night outside was starless,
the lamps flickered irregularly, the guides lay heavily asleep in their
blankets on beds of pine boughs in the corner. It was a strange place
for the birth of a man's soul, but as Frank Ravenel read the letter a
tenderness, a selfless tenderness, for the sad little writer of it came
to him. He had already protected her from himself--"somewhat late," he
confessed, with bitterness, and there had been some effort "not to do
the worst." But the feeling that held him as he read was different from
any he had had before. He dwelt on her lonesomeness in the world: the
long nights she must have passed alone watching the coming of death.
Unspeakable tenderness brought a sob to his throat and a pain over his
heart, as though suffering from a blow. The remembrance of her on the
wind-blown hill came back to him; the scarlet handkerchief waved against
the blue of the sky, and the brave call over the brown grass: "_Don't
think of me!_ Good-bye!" It seemed in some way to have been a cry of
victory.

He went to the door of the tent straining his eyes into the blackness.
Alone in the great woods with the night noises, under the silent stars,
things took on a different value. What was he compared to her?

Stripped of family and wealth, how would each measure before a judging
world. "She was so"--he hesitated in his mind for a word--"she was so
_square_," he said to himself. Wave after wave of pity swept over him