ched him.

"Where is Rimouski?" Northwick asked, when he found himself alone with
the priest that evening.

"It is on the St. Lawrence. It is the last and first point where the
steamers touch in going and coming between Quebec and Liverpool." Pere
Etienne had been weeping, and his heart was softened and emboldened by
the anxiety he felt. "It is my native village--where I lived till I went
to make my studies in the Laval University. It is going home for me.
Perhaps they will let me remain there." He added, by an irresistible
impulse of pity and love, "I wish you were going home, too, Mr.
Warwick!"

"I wish I were!" said Northwick, with a heavy sigh. "But I can't--yet."

"This is a desert for you," Pere Etienne pressed on. "I can see that. I
have seen how solitary you are."

"Yes. It's lonesome," Northwick admitted.

"My son," said the young priest to the man who was old enough to be his
father, and he put his hand on Northwick's, where it lay on his knee, as
they sat side by side before the fire, "is there something you could
wish to say to me? Something I might do to help you?"

In a moment all was open between them, and they knew each other's
meaning. "Yes," said Northwick, and he felt the wish to trust in the
priest and to be ruled by him well up like a tide of hot blood from his
heart. It sank back again. This pure soul was too innocent, too unversed
in the world and its ways to know his offence in its right proportion;
to know it as Northwick himself knew it; to be able to account for it
and condone it. The affair, if he could understand it at all, would
shock him; he must blame it as relentlessly as Northwick's own child
would if her love did not save him. With the next word he closed that
which was open between them, a rift in his clouds that heaven itself had
seemed to look through. "I have a letter--a letter that I wish you would
take and mail for me in Rimouski."

"I will take it with great pleasure," said the priest, but he had the
sadness of a deep disappointment in his tone.

Northwick was disappointed, too; almost injured. He had something like a
perception that if Pere Etienne had been a coarser, commoner soul, he
could have told him everything, and saved his own soul by the
confession.

About a month after the priest's departure the first steamboat came up
the Saguenay from Quebec. By this time Bird was a desperate man.
Northwick was still there in his house, with all that money which he
woul