word "Fort" did not
stand for population, and there were probably not more than fifty white
people at all the posts between the Great Slave and the Arctic. She was
not one of these, or the fact would have been known at the Landing.

Neither could she be a riverman's daughter, for it was inconceivable
that either a riverman or a trapper would have sent this girl down into
civilization, where this girl had undoubtedly been. It was that point
chiefly which puzzled Kent. She was not only beautiful. She had been
tutored in schools that were not taught by wilderness missioners. In
her, it seemed to him, he had seen the beauty and the wild freedom of
the forests as they had come to him straight out of the heart of an
ancient aristocracy that was born nearly two hundred years ago in the
old cities of Quebec and Montreal.

His mind flashed back at that thought: he remembered the time when he
had sought out every nook and cranny of that ancient town of Quebec,
and had stood over graves two centuries old, and deep in his soul had
envied the dead the lives they had lived. He had always thought of
Quebec as a rare old bit of time-yellowed lace among cities--the heart
of the New World as it had once been, still beating, still whispering
of its one-time power, still living in the memory of its mellowed
romance, its almost forgotten tragedies--a ghost that lived, that still
beat back defiantly the destroying modernism that would desecrate its
sacred things. And it pleased him to think of Marette Radisson as the
spirit of it, wandering north, and still farther north--even as the
spirits of the profaned dead had risen from the Landing to go farther
on.

And feeling that the way had at last been made easy for him, Kent
smiled out into the glorious day and whispered softly, as if she were
standing there, listening to him:

"If I had lived--I would have called you--my Quebec. It's pretty, that
name. It stands for a lot. And so do you."

And out in the hall, as Kent whispered those words, stood Father
Layonne, with a face that was whiter than the mere presence of death
had ever made it before. At his side stood Cardigan, aged ten years
since he had placed his stethoscope at Kent's chest that morning. And
behind these two were Kedsty, with a face like gray rock, and young
Mercer, in whose staring eyes was the horror of a thing he could not
yet quite comprehend. Cardigan made an effort to speak and failed.
Kedsty wiped his forehead, as