e
was very gentle and light-handed, like a woman; but Northwick felt one
touch on the pouch of his belt, and refused further help.

He let his host carry his two bags into the next room for him; the bag
that he had brought with the few things from home, when he pretended
that he was coming away for a day or two, and the bag that he had got in
Quebec to hold the things he had to buy there. When Bird set them down
beside his bed he could not bear to see the bag from home, and he pushed
it under out of sight. Then he tumbled himself on the bed, and pulled
the bearskin robe that he found on it up over him, and fell into a thin
sleep, that was not so different from his dim waking that he was sure it
had been sleep when Bird came back with a lamp.

"Been 'aving a little nap?" he asked, looking gayly down on Northwick's
bewildered face. "Well, that is all right! We have supper, now, pretty
soon. You hungry? Well, in a 'alf-hour."

He went out again, and Northwick, after some efforts, made out to rise.
His skull felt sore, and his arms as if they had been beaten with hard
blows. But after he had bathed his face and hands in the warm water Bird
had brought with the lamp, he found himself better, though he was still
wrapped in that cloudy uncertainty of himself and of his sleeping or
waking. He saw some pictures about on the coarse, white walls: the Seven
Stations of the Cross, in colored prints; a lithograph of Indians
burning a Jesuit priest. Over the bed's head hung a chromo of Our Lady,
with seven swords piercing her heart; beside the bed was a Parian
crucifix, with the figure of Christ writhing on it.

These things made Northwick feel very far and strange. His simple and
unimaginative nature could in nowise relate itself to this alien faith,
this alien language. He heard soft voices of women in the next room, the
first that he had heard since he last heard his daughters'. A girl's
voice singing was severed by a door that closed and then opened to let
it be heard a few notes more, and again closed.

But he found Bird still alone in the next room when he returned to it.
"Well, now, we go to supper as soon as Father Etienne comes. He is our
curate--our minister--here. And he eats with me when he heat anywhere. I
tell 'im 'e hought to have my appetite, if he wants to keep up his
spiritual strength. The body is the foundation of the soul, no? Well,
you let that foundation tumble hin, and then where you got you' soul,
heigh?