Somewhere in the house a board, creaked.  Jessie heard it inattentively, for in the bitter cold woodwork was always snapping and cracking.

Beresford had offered her a new philosophy of life.  She did not quite accept it, yet it fascinated.  He believed that the duty of happiness was laid on people as certainly as the duty of honesty.  She remembered that once he had said....

There had come to her no sound, but Jessie knew that some one had opened the door and was standing on the threshold watching her.  She turned her head.  Her self-invited guest was Whaley.

Jessie rose.  “What do you want?”

She was startled at the man’s silent entry, ready to be alarmed if necessary, but not yet afraid.  It was as though her thoughts waited for the cue he would presently give.  Some instinct for safety made her cautious.  She did not tell the free trader that her father and Fergus were from home.

He looked at her, appraisingly, from head to foot, in such a way that she felt his gaze had stripped her.

“You know what I want.  You know what I’m going to get ... some day,” he purred in his slow, feline way.

She pushed from her mind a growing apprehension.

“Father and Fergus—­if you want them—­”

“Have I said I wanted them?” he asked.  “They’re out in the woods trappin’.  I’m not lookin’ for them.  The two of us’ll be company for each other.”

“Go,” she said, anger flaring at his insolence.  “Go.  You’ve no business here.”

“I’m not here for business, but for pleasure, my dear.”

The cold, fishy eyes in his white face gloated.  Suddenly she wanted to scream and pushed back the desire scornfully.  If she did, nobody would hear her.  This had to be fought out one to one.

“Why didn’t you knock?” she demanded.

“We’ll say I did and that you didn’t hear me,” he answered suavely.  “What’s it matter among friends anyhow?”

“What do you want?” By sheer will power she kept her voice low.

“Your mother’s over at the house.  I dropped in to say she’ll probably stay all night.”

“Is your wife worse?”

He lifted the black brows that contrasted so sharply with the pallor of the face.  “Really you get ahead of me, my dear.  I don’t recall ever getting married.”

“That’s a hateful thing to say,” she flamed, and bit her lower lip with small white teeth to keep from telling the squaw-man what she thought of him.  The Cree girl he had taken to wife was going down into the Valley of the Shadow to bear him a child while he callously repudiated her.

He opened his fur coat and came to the fireplace.  “I can say nicer things—­to the right girl,” he said, and looked meaningly at her.

“I’ll have to go get Susie Lemoine to stay with me,” Jessie said hurriedly.  “I didn’t know Mother wasn’t coming home.”

She made a move toward a fur lying across the back of a chair.