e spring trade--Marcel, the man
who had murdered his partners. But now the stain of infamy had been
washed clean from an honored name. In his humble grave in the Mission
Cemetery, Andre Marcel could now sleep in peace, for in the eyes of the
small world of the East Coast, his son had come scathless through the
long snows. The tale would not now travel down the coast in the
Inspector's canoe that another white man had turned murderer for the
scanty food of his friends.

And with his acquittal by the Company and the Crees, his love for Julie
Breton, more poignant from its very hopelessness, gave him no rest. As
he struggled with renunciation, he brought himself to realize that,
after all, it had been but presumption on his part to hope that this
girl with her education of years in a Quebec convent, her acquaintance
with the ways of the great world "outside," should look upon a humble
Company hunter as a possible husband. He had all along mistaken her
kindness, her friendship, for something more which she had never felt.
In comparison with Wallace who, Jean had heard Gillies say, might some
day go to Winnipeg as Assistant Commissioner of the Company, he was as
nothing. Doomed by his inheritance and his training to a life beyond the
pale of civilization, he could offer Julie Breton little but a love that
knew no bounds, no frontiers; that would find no trail, which led to
her, too long; no water too vast; no height too sheer; to separate them,
did she but call him.

So, in the hour of his triumph, the soul-sick Marcel went to one who
never had failed him; who loved him with a singleness of heart but
rarely paralleled by human kind; who, however humble his lot, would give
him the worship accorded to no king--his dog.

Seated beside Fleur with her squealing children crawling over him, he
circled her great neck with his arms and told his troubles to a hairy
ear. She sought his hand with her tongue, her throat rumbling with
content, for had she not there on the grass in the soft June sun, all
her world--her puppies and her God, Jean Marcel?

There, Julie Breton, having in vain announced supper from the Mission
door, found them, man and dog, and led Marcel away, protesting. The girl
wore the frock she had donned in honor of his return, and never to Jean
had she seemed so vibrant with life, never had the color bathed her dark
face so exquisitely, nor the tumbled masses of her hair so allured him.
But as he entered the Mission