udely fashioned and well worn, tongs and a heavy
hammer and a small anvil.

But beyond all this, a thing that held his wondering gaze and brought
the fur cap from his head, there stood an altar, rude as the rest, but
still an altar of God, with a black iron crucifix, whose pale ivory
Christ glimmered in the gathering evening, upright upon it. Before the
crucifix, and at either end, were the burnt-out evidences of tallow
candles, while flanking the holy Symbol there stood two wooden crosses,
their pieces held together by bindings of thread. Before one there lay
a heap of little withered flowers, frail things of the forest and the
spring, and every one was snowy white. Across the other hung a solitary
blossom, first of its kind to open its passionate eyes to the sun, and
it was blood-red, counterpart of that wee star which Alfred de Courtenay
had snatched from the stockade wall one day in another spring.

The earnest blue eyes of the man were very grave, touched with a deep
tenderness.

"Maren!" he whispered reverently; "maid of the splendid heart!"

So deep was he in contemplation of the things before him and his own
holy thoughts that he did not hear a soft sound behind him, the fall of
a light step.

A breath that was half a gasp turned him on his heel.

Leaning through the parted curtain of the hanging vines, one hand at her
throat, the other holding three candles, and her dark eyes wide above
her thinned brown cheeks, she stood herself. At her knee there hung the
heavy head of the great dog, Loup.

She, as she had been when first he looked upon her, yet intangibly
changed, the same yet not the same.

They stood in silence and looked into each other's eyes as if void of
speech, of motion, held by the mighty yearning that must look and look
with insatiable intensity, the half unreal reality of the moment.

And then the stopped breath in the girl's throat caught itself with a
little sound that broke the spell.

The man sprang forward and took her in his arms, not passionately,
strongly, as he had done once before, but with a love so high, so
chastened, so humble that it gentled his touch to reverence.

"I have come, Maren," he said brokenly; "I have followed you to the land
you sought. Maid of my heart! My soul!"

Without words, without question, she yielded herself to his embrace,
lifted her face to him and gave into his keeping that which was his from
the beginning.

"Mother Mary! I thank Thee!" he hea