het again--I shall not be ashamed to
get down on my knees and ask her pardon, Marie-Anne!"

For the first time he spoke the name which she had given him permission
to use. And she noticed it. He could not help seeing that--a flashing
instant in which the indefinable confession of it was in her face, as
though his use of it had surprised her, or pleased her, or both. Then
it was gone.

She did not answer, but rose from the big chair, and went to the
window, and stood with her back toward him, looking out over the river.
And then, suddenly, they heard a voice. It was the voice he had heard
twice in his sickness, the voice that had roused him from his sleep
last night, crying out in his room for Black Roger Audemard. It came to
him distinctly through the open door in a low and moaning monotone. He
had not taken his eyes from the slim figure of St. Pierre's wife, and
he saw a little tremor pass through her now.

"I heard that voice--again--last night," said David. "It was in this
cabin, asking for Black Roger Audemard."

She did not seem to hear him, and he also turned so that he was looking
at the open door of the cabin.

The sun, pouring through in a golden flood, was all at once darkened,
and in the doorway--framed vividly against the day--was the figure of a
man. A tense breath came to Carrigan's lips. At first he felt a shock,
then an overwhelming sense of curiosity and of pity. The man was
terribly deformed. His back and massive shoulders were so twisted and
bent that he stood no higher than a twelve-year-old boy; yet standing
straight, he would have been six feet tall if an inch, and splendidly
proportioned. And in that same breath with which shock and pity came to
him, David knew that it was accident and not birth that had malformed
the great body that stood like a crouching animal in the open door. At
first he saw only the grotesqueness of it--the long arms that almost
touched the floor, the broken back, the twisted shoulders--and then,
with a deeper thrill, he saw nothing of these things but only the face
and the head of the man. There was something god-like about them,
fastened there between the crippled shoulders. It was not beauty, but
strength--the strength of rock, of carven granite, as if each feature
had been chiseled out of something imperishable and everlasting, yet
lacking strangely and mysteriously the warm illumination that comes
from a living soul. The man was not old, nor was he young. And he di