ond of having a farm and a conservatory with rare plants. But the
flowers were possessions, not passions; he did not speak of them as if
they afforded him any artistic or scientific delight. The young priest
learned that he had put a good deal of money in pictures; but then the
pictures seemed to have become investments, and of the nature of stocks
and bonds. He found that this curious American did not care to read the
English books which Bird offered to lend him out of the little store of
gifts and accidents accumulated in the course of years from bountiful or
forgetful tourists; the books in French Pere Etienne proposed to him,
Northwick said he did not know how to read. He showed no liking for
music, except a little for the singing of Bird's niece, Virginie, but
when the priest thought he might care to understand that she sang the
ballads which the first voyagers had brought from France into the
wilderness, or which had sprung out of the joy and sorrow of its hard
life, he saw that the fact said nothing to Northwick, and that it rather
embarrassed him. The American could not take part in any of those
discussions of abstract questions which the priest and the old woodsman
delighted in, and which they sometimes tried to make him share. He
apparently did not know what they meant. It was only when Pere Etienne
gave him up as the creature of a civilization too ugly and arid to be
borne, that he began to love him as a brother; when he could make
nothing of Northwick's mind, he conceived the hope of saving his soul.

Pere Etienne felt sure that Northwick had a soul, and he had his
misgivings that it was a troubled one. He, too, had heard of the
American defaulter, who has a celebrity of his own in Canada penetrating
to different men with different suggestion, and touching here and there
a pure and unworldly heart, such as Pere Etienne bore in his breast,
with commiseration. The young priest did not conceive very clearly of
the make and manner of the crime he suspected the elusive and mysterious
stranger of committing; but he imagined that the great sum of money he
knew him possessed of, was spoil of some sort; and he believed that
Northwick's hesitation to employ it in any way was proof of an uneasy
conscience in its possession. Why had he come to that lonely place in
midwinter with a treasure such as that; and why did he keep the money by
him, instead of putting it in a bank? Pere Etienne talked these
questions over with Bi