in the prow, she raised her
face to the cool blue sky, and turned once more to that West whose voice
had called from her cradle, but, with some strange perversity of
fate, her heart drew back to the squat stockade slowly fading into the
distance.

The sweet wind of the Whispering Hills was very faint on her soul.

CHAPTER XXIX BITTER ALOES

Eight months passed over the country of the Assiniboine, bringing their
changes. The short full-tide of the summer seemed to run out with the
going of the venturers, and the autumn to come from the north-west in a
night.

Great splashes of colour dropped on the land, spilled from the palette
of some careless giant,--gold and crimson and purple. Glorious fires
burned in the cooling skies and the sweet breath of autumn tingled in
the air.

There was comment, and the shaking of heads among the old trappers. The
wrong time of year to take the long trail with women,--the wrong time,
but, bon Dieu! who was to stop that woman with the sombre eyes? Voila! A
woman to thrill the blood in any man who was still warm with life!

"Love awakened in her would be a thing of flame and fury, they had
thought, that long past day," thought Pierre Garcon to himself; "he and
that friend of his heart, Marc Dupre,--it had been a thing of patient
servitude, of transcendent daring, and Marc Dupre; ah! He had been a
part of it. But there was much of mystery about it all, and no one knew,
nor would any know, all that it had meant."

So the changes came and passed, and when Anders McElroy again opened his
eyes to reason, the world was white against the pane of the one window
of the little room,--the long snows had arrived. Winter was upon the
Northland.

It was on a night when the wind without howled like a lost soul shut
out from the universe and the sucking of the chimney-throat roared to
heaven.

Edmonton Ridgar sat at the hearth gazing into the leaping flames, and
Rette de Lancy passed and repassed among the shifting shadows, busy at
some kindly task.

Long he lay, this man returned from the Borderland of the Unknown,
and stared weakly at the familiar sights that were yet touched with a
puzzling strangeness.

It seemed that this was all as it should be, and yet there was something
lacking,--a great gap, whose images and happenings were wiped out as
a cloth wipes clean a slate,--a space of darkness, of blankness, whose
empty void held prescience of some great sadness. He lay on his side
fa