“Mademoiselle,” he said, “ah, what happiness!  After three years!”

Maggie stopped and looked at him with troubled eyes; all the color slowly left her face.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.  And there was something like fear in her voice.

“No harm, mademoiselle, but good.  I have come down from big game to vermin.  I have here a saloon rifle.  I wait till a water-rat comes, and then I shoot him.”

The canoe had drifted closer to the land, the paddle trailing in the water.

“You are looking at my white hairs,” he went on, in a sudden need of conversation.  “Please bring your boat a little nearer.”

The paddle twisted lazily in the water like a fish’s tail.

“Hold tight,” he said, reaching down.

With a little laugh he lifted the canoe and its occupant far up on to the bank.

“Despite my white hairs,” he said, with a tap of both hands on his broad chest.

“I attach no importance to them,” she answered, taking his proffered hand and stepping over the light bulwark.  “I have gray ones myself.  I am getting old too.”

“How old?” he asked, looking down at her with his old bluntness.

“Twenty-eight.”

“Ah, they are summers,” he said; “mine have turned to winters.  Will you sit here where I was sitting?  See, I will spread this rug for your white dress.”

Maggie paused, looking through the trees toward the sinking sun.  The light fell on her face and showed one or two lines which had not been there before.  It showed a patient tenderness in the steady eyes which had always been there—­which Catrina had noticed in the stormy days that were past.

“I cannot stay long,” she replied.  “I am with the Faneaux at Brandon for a few days.  They dine at seven.”

“Ah! her ladyship is a good friend of mine.  You remember her charity ball in town, when it was settled that you should come to Osterno.  A strange world, mademoiselle—­a very strange world, so small, and yet so large and bare for some of us!”

Maggie looked at him.  Then she sat down.

“Tell me,” she said, “all that has happened since then.”

“I went back,” answered Steinmetz, “and we were duly exiled from Russia.  It was sure to come.  We were too dangerous.  Altogether too quixotic for an autocracy.  For myself I did not mind, but it hurt Paul.”

There was a little pause, while the water lapped and whispered at their feet.

“I heard,” said Maggie at length, in a measured voice, “that he had gone abroad for big game.”

“Yes—­to India.”

“He did not go to America?” enquired Maggie indifferently.  She was idly throwing fragments of wood into the river.

“No,” answered Steinmetz, looking straight in front of him.  “No, he did not go to America.”

“And you?”