he was a coward,
and that these young people had been stronger than he. For in their
happiness and the faith which he had falsely built up in them they had
resigned themselves to the inevitable, while he, in these moments of
cowardice, had shown them the way to temptation. And yet as he stood
there, looking in the direction they had gone, he felt no remorse
because of what he had done, and a weight seemed to have lifted itself
from his shoulders.

For a time the more selfish instincts of the man rose in him, fighting
down the sacrificial humility of the great faith of which he was a
messenger. The new sensation thrilled him, and in its thrill he felt his
heart beating a little faster, and hope rising in him. Five years were
a long time--FOR HIM. That was the thought which kept repeating itself
over and over in his brain, and with it came that other thought, that
self-preservation was the first law of existence, and therefore could
not be a sin. Thus did Father John turn traitor to his spoken words,
though his calm and smiling face gave no betrayal of it when Nada and
Roger returned to the cabin an hour later, their arms filled with red
bakneesh vines and early wildflowers.

Nada's cheeks were as pink as the bakneesh, and her eyes as blue as the
rock-violets she wore on her breast.

And Father John knew that Jolly Roger was no longer oppressed by
the fear of a menace which he was helpless to oppose, for there was
something very confident in the look of his eyes and the manner in which
they rested upon Nada.

Peter alone saw the mysterious thing which happened in the early
evening. He was with Nada in her room. And she was the old Nada again,
hugging his shaggy head in her arms, and whispering to him in the old,
excited way. And strange memory of a bundle came back to Peter, for very
quietly, as if unseen ears might be listening to her, Nada gathered many
things in a pile on the table, and made another bundle. This bundle she
thrust under her bed, just as a long time ago she had thrust a similar
bundle under a banksian clump in the meadowland below Cragg's Ridge.

Father John went to his bed very early, and he was thinking of Breault.
The Hudson's Bay Company post was only twelve miles away, and Breault
would surely go there before questing from cabin to cabin for his
victim.

So it happened that a little after midnight he rose without making a
sound, and by the light of a candle wrote a note for Nada, saying he