d her if she
ventured too far from some protected fireside. Fierce envy of squaws who
could tramp winter snows and were not despised for their brief marriages
may have flashed through Elizabeth like the little self-protecting blaze
a man lighted around his own cabin when the prairie was on fire. Why in
all the swarming centuries of human experience had the lot of a creature
with such genius for loving been cast where she was utterly thrown away?

Solitary and carrying her passion a hidden coal she walked in the
footsteps of martyrs behind the pair of reunited lovers.

"Take care, Rosanne. Don't stumble, darling!" said the man to whom
Elizabeth had been married by a law she respected until a higher law
unhus-banded her.

Cecilia noted the passionate clutch of her hand and its withdrawal
without touching him as he lurched over a rock.

He put his wife tenderly in the boat and then turned with kind formality
to Elizabeth; but Ludlow had helped her.

"Well, bon voyage," said the lighthouse-keeper. "Mind you run up the
lantern on the mast as soon as you get aboard. I don't think there'll be
any chase. The Irish have freed their minds."

"I'll send your fishing-boat back as soon as I can, Ludlow."

"Turn it over to father; he'll see to it. Give him news of us and
our love to all the folks. He will be anxious to know the truth about
Beaver."

"Good-bye, Elizabeth and Rosanne!"

"Good-bye, Cecilia!"

A grinding on pebbles, then the thump of adjusted oars and the rush of
water on each side of a boat's course, marked the fugitives' progress
towards the anchored smack.

Suspended on starlit waters as if in eternity, and watching the smoke of
her past go up from a looted island, Elizabeth had the sense of a great
company around her. The uninstructed girl from the little kingdom
of Beaver divined a worldful of souls waiting and loving in hopeless
silence and marching resistlessly as the stars to their reward. For
there is a development like the unfolding of a god for those who suffer
in strength and overcome.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The King Of Beaver, and Beaver Lights, by
Mary Hartwell Catherwood

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