that went softly, making rich the land, the
fountain of her perfect deeds. He, looking into her eyes, saw himself
when he had no sin on his soul; and she into his--as it seemed, her own
always--saw herself as it were in a cobweb of evils which she could not
understand. As his heart grew lighter, hers grew sick, even when
she knew that these were the only eyes in which she could ever see
happiness.

It grew upon her that Ambroise's sins were hers and not his; that she,
not he, had bartered a soul for the wages of sin. When they said at the
Fort that her eyes and Ambroise's, and her face and his, were as of one
piece, the pain of the thought deepened, and other pains came likewise,
for her father and the preacher urged that a man who had sold himself to
the devil was no comrade for her in little or much. Yet she loved him as
only they can who love for the first time, and with the deep primitive
emotions which are out of the core of nature. But her heart had been
cloven as by a wedge, and she would not, and could not, lie in his
arms, nor rest her cheek to his, nor seek that haven where true love
is fastened like a nail on the wall of that inn called home. He was
herself, he must be brought back; and so, one night, while yet the
winter was on, she stole away out of the Fort, pausing at his door a
moment only, laying her hand upon it as one might tenderly lay it on
the brow of a sick sleeper. Then she stepped away out on the plains,
pointing her course by the moon, for the Mount of Lost Winters and the
Tent of the Purple Mat.

When the people of the Fort waked, and it was found that she was gone,
search parties sallied out, but returned as they went after many days.
And at last, because Ambroise suffered as one ground between rolling
stones, even the preacher and the father of the girl relented towards
him. After some weeks there came word through a wandering tribe that the
body of a girl had been found on the Child o' Sin River, and black pelts
were hung as mourning on the lodges and houses and walls of the Fort,
and the father shut himself in his room, admitting no one. Still, they
mourned without great cause.

But, if the girl had taken the sins of Ambroise with her, she had left
him beside that soft flowing river of her goodness; and the savour of
the herbs on its banks was to him like the sun on a patch of pennyroyal,
bringing medicine to the sick body through the nostrils. So one morning,
after many months, having