e gossip of the old village, she found these words: "Your old
friend Brown did not jump into the sea at grief for his rejection,
after all. He has written to somebody here that he is coming home. I
believe he said that he loved you all the same as ever."

The greatest grief of Emilia was that she should have been so wicked as
to be grieved. Had she not prayed all these years, when she could pray
at all, for the safety of the young student? Had she not prayed against
storms and icebergs? And now that he was coming, her heart smote her as
if he were a ghost of some one whom she had murdered! Whether she loved
him, or Edwards, or anybody, indeed she could not tell. But she would
do penance for her crime. And so, when next she heard the quiet voice
of "the long trapper" asking for her, she refused to see him, though
the refusal all but killed her.

Poor Edwards! How he paced the shore of Swan Lake all that night! For
when love comes into the soul of a solitary man it has all the force
that all the thousand interests of life have to one in the busy world.
How terrible were the temptations that sometimes assailed the religious
eremites we can never guess.

Sunset of the next day found Edwards in the Red River Valley, far on
his way toward Fort Garry, bent on spending the rest of his life as a
"free trader" in British America. As for Emilia, she was now in total
darkness. The sun had set, and the moon had not appeared. Brown might
be dead, or she might not love him, or he might never find her. And she
had thrown away her paradise, and there was only blackness left.

Edwards had already come within a few miles of Georgetown, where he was
to take passage in that strangest of all the craft that ever frightened
away the elk, the little seven-by-nine steamer Anson Northrup, when, as
he was striding desperately along the trail, he was suddenly checked by
a thought. He stood five minutes in indecision, then turned and began
to walk rapidly in the opposite direction. At Breckinridge he found a
stage, and getting out at Gager's he went down the trail toward
Lindsley's.

Now Davy Lindsley had been in a terrible state of ferment. When he had
found the philosopher, "the uncontaminated child of Nature, the
self-educated combination of civilized and savage man," his daughter
had perversely refused him, and the old man had taken the
disappointment so to heart that he was in a state bordering on frenzy.

"Misfortune always pursues me!"