ent, muddy way, as the
step came nearer. And I worked with hurrying hands at the canoe.

Then came a voice. No whispering, no rustling, nothing vague and
formless and haunting, but a low, commanding call:--

"Bonjour, mon ami."

I did not start. If I turned slowly it was because I knew what was
waiting me, and was adjusting several possibilities to meet it. It was
a man's voice that called, yet its every inflection was familiar,
familiar as the beating of my heart. For madame, my wife, had called
to me more or less often in the twin of that voice with its slurring
deliberateness and its insolent disregard of the pitfall accents of a
foreign tongue. And now I turned to meet her cousin, the man whom she
had promised to marry; the man who had deserted her to the knives of
savages; the man whom she despised and yet feared, and who now called
to me in a voice that was hers and yet was not; that haunted and
repelled, all in one. I did not think out any of this by rule and
line. I only knew that I dreaded meeting this man who was stepping,
stepping into my life through the fog, and that I turned to meet him
with my heart like ice but my brain on fire.

I had ado to keep my tongue from exclaiming when I turned. I do not
know why I expected the man to be small, except that I myself am overly
large, and that I was looking for him to be my antithesis in every way.
But the figure that loomed toward me out of the luminous mist dwarfed
my own stature. Never had my eyes seen so powerful a man. Long and
swinging as an elk, he had the immense, humped shoulders of a buffalo
and the length of arm of a baboon. His head would have sat well on
some rough bronze coin of an early day. Semitic in type he looked,
with his eagle-beaked nose and prominent cheek bones, but the blue of
his eyes was English. They were intelligent eyes.

He looked at me a moment, and I stood silent for his initiative. I
remembered that I was dressed roughly, was torn and rumpled by my
contest with the forest, and that I must appear an out-at-elbows
_coureur de bois_. He would not know me for the man he was seeking. I
waited for him to ask my name, and selected one to give him that was my
own and yet was not M. de Montlivet. Since names cannot be sold nor
squandered, my father had bequeathed me a plethora of them.

But I credited the Englishman with too little acuteness. He stepped
forward. "This is Monsieur de Montlivet?"

I could do no les