u saw a cloud on the prairie. It heaved, a steam came from it,
and sometimes you caught the flash of ten thousand eyes as the beasts
tossed their heads and then bent them again to the ground and rolled on,
five hundred men after them, our women shouting and laughing, and arrows
and bullets flying.... I can remember a time also when a great Indian
battle happened just outside the fort, and, with my mother crying after
him, my father went out with a priest to stop it. My father was wounded,
and then the priest frightened them, and they gathered their dead
together and buried them. We lived in a fort for a long time, and my
mother died there. She was a good woman, and she loved my father. I have
seen her on her knees for hours praying when he was away.--I have her
rosary now. They called her Ste. Heloise. Afterwards I was always with
my father. He was a good man, but he was never happy; and only at
the last would he listen to the priest, though they were always great
friends. He was not a Catholic of course, but he said that didn't
matter."

Sir William interrupted huskily. "Why did he never come back?"

"I do not know quite, but he said to me once, 'Gaston, you'll tell them
of me some day, and it will be a soft pillow for their heads! You can
mend a broken life, but the ring of it is gone.' I think he meant
to come back when I was about fourteen; but things happened, and he
stayed."

There was a pause. Gaston seemed brooding, and Lady Belward said:

"Go on, please."

"There isn't so very much to tell. The life was the only one I had
known, and it was all right. But my father had told me of this life. He
taught me himself--he and Father Decluse and a Moravian missionary for
awhile. I knew some Latin and history, a bit of mathematics, a good
deal of astronomy, some French poets, and Shakespere. Shakespere is
wonderful. ... My father wanted me to come here at once after he died,
but I knew better--I wanted to get sense first. So I took a place in the
Company. It wasn't all fun.

"I had to keep my wits sharp. I was only a youngster, and I had to do
with men as crafty and as silly as old Polonius. I was sent to Labrador.
That was not a life for a Christian. Once a year a ship comes to the
port, bringing the year's mail and news from the world. When you watch
that ship go out again, and you turn round and see the filthy Esquimaux
and Indians, and know that you've got to live for another year with
them, sit in their dirty