while."

His fingers caressed the leg just below the knee. "Father," he suddenly
added, "what does it mean when you hear a bird sing in the middle of
the night?" The woodsman looked down anxiously into the boy's face. "It
hasn't no meaning, Dominique. There ain't such a thing on the Labrador
Heights as a bird singin' in the night. That's only in warm countries
where there's nightingales. So--bien sur!"

The boy had a wise, dreamy, speculative look. "Well, I guess it was a
nightingale--it didn't sing like any I ever heard."

The look of nervousness deepened in the woodsman's face. "What did it
sing like, Dominique?"

"So it made you shiver. You wanted it to go on, and yet you didn't want
it. It was pretty, but you felt as if something was going to snap inside
of you."

"When did you hear it, my son?"

"Twice last night--and--and I guess it was Sunday the other time. I
don't know, for there hasn't been no Sunday up here since mother went
away--has there?"

"Mebbe not."

The veins were beating like live cords in the man's throat and at his
temples.

"'Twas just the same as Father Corraine bein' here, when mother had
Sunday, wasn't it?"

The man made no reply, but a gloom drew down his forehead, and his lips
doubled in as if he endured physical pain. He got to his feet and paced
the floor. For weeks he had listened to the same kind of talk from this
wounded, and, as he thought, dying son, and he was getting less and less
able to bear it. The boy at nine years of age was, in manner of speech,
the merest child, but his thoughts were sometimes large and wise. The
only white child within a compass of three hundred miles or so; the
lonely life of the hills and plains, so austere in winter, so melted to
a sober joy in summer; listening to the talk of his elders at camp-fires
and on the hunting-trail, when, even as an infant almost, he was swung
in a blanket from a tree or was packed in the torch-crane of a canoe;
and, more than all, the care of a good, loving--if passionate--little
mother: all these had made him far wiser than his years. He had been
hours upon hours each day alone with the birds, and squirrels, and wild
animals, and something of the keen scent and instinct of the animal
world had entered into his body and brain, so that he felt what he could
not understand.

He saw that he had worried his father, and it troubled him. He thought
of something. "Daddy," he said, "let me have it."

A smile struggled