down, was a man lying in the snow. He had strayed from the
obliterated road, and had fallen down the crevasse, twisting his foot
cruelly. Unable to walk, he had crawled several hundred yards in the snow,
but his strength had given out, and then he had called to the house, on
whose dark windows flickered the flames of the fire, the name of the girl
he had come so far to see.

[Illustration: "PAULINE," HE SAID, FEEBLY, AND FAINTED IN HER ARMS]

With a cry of joy and pain at once she recognized him now. It was as her
heart had said--it was Julien, Manette's brother. In a moment she was
beside him, her arm around his shoulder.

"Pauline!" he said, feebly, and fainted in her arms. An instant later she
was speeding to the house, and, rousing her mother and two of the
stablemen, she snatched a flask of brandy from a cupboard and hastened
back.

An hour later Julien Labrosse lay in the great sitting-room beside the
fire, his foot and ankle bandaged, and at ease, his face alight with all
that had brought him there. And once again the Indian mother with a sure
instinct knew why he had come, and saw that now her girl would have a
white man's home, and, for her man, one of the race like her father's
race, white and conquering.

"I'm sorry to give trouble," Julien said, laughing--he had a trick of
laughing lightly; "but I'll be able to get back to the Portage
to-morrow."

To this the Indian mother said, however: "To please yourself is a great
thing, but to please others is better; and so you will stay here till you
can walk back to the Portage, M'sieu' Julien."

"Well, I've never been so comfortable," he said--"never so happy. If you
don't mind the trouble!"

The Indian woman nodded pleasantly, and found an excuse to leave the room.
But before she went she contrived to place near his elbow one of the
scraps of paper on which Pauline had drawn his face, with that of Manette.
It brought a light of hope and happiness into his eyes, and he thrust the
paper under the fur robes of the couch.

"What are you doing with your life?" Pauline asked him, as his eyes sought
hers a few moments later.

"Oh, I have a big piece of work before me," he answered eagerly, "a great
chance--to build a bridge over the St. Lawrence, and I'm only thirty! I've
got my start. Then, I've made over the old Seigneury my father left me,
and I'm going to live in it. It will be a fine place, when I've done with
it, comfortable and big, with old oak timber