Nor had his resolution been permanently affected by either the girl’s threat to make away with herself or by his momentary softening when she had fainted.  The affair was thereby complicated, but that was all.  In the sincerity of the threat he recognized his own iron nature, and was perhaps a little pleased at its manifestation.  He knew she intended to fulfil her promise not to survive her lover, but at the moment this did not reach his fears; it only aroused further his dogged opposition.

The Free Trader’s speech as he left the room, however, had touched the one flaw in Galen Albret’s confidence of righteousness.  Wearied with the struggles and the passions he had undergone, his brain numbed, his will for the moment in abeyance, he seated himself and contemplated the images those two words had called up.

Graehme Stewart!  That man he had first met at Fort Rae over twenty years ago.  It was but just after he had married Virginia’s mother.  At once his imagination, with the keen pictorial power of those who have dwelt long in the Silent Places, brought forward the other scene—­that of his wooing.  He had driven his dogs into Fort la Cloche after a hard day’s run in seventy-five degrees of frost.  Weary, hungry, half-frozen, he had staggered into the fire-lit room.  Against the blaze he had caught for a moment a young girl’s profile, lost as she turned her face toward him in startled question of his entrance.  Men had cared for his dogs.  The girl had brought him hot tea.  In the corner of the fire they two had whispered one to the other—­the already grizzled traveller of the silent land, the fresh, brave north-maiden.  At midnight, their parkas drawn close about their faces in the fearful cold, they had met outside the inclosure of the Post.  An hour later they were away under the aurora for Qu’Apelle.  Galen Albret’s nostrils expanded as he heard the crack, crack, crack of the remorseless dog-whip whose sting drew him away from the vain pursuit.  After the marriage at Qu’Apelle they had gone a weary journey to Rae, and there he had first seen Graehme Stewart.

Fort Rae is on the northwestward arm of the Great Slave Lake in the country of the Dog Ribs, only four degrees under the Arctic Circle.  It is a dreary spot, for the Barren Grounds are near.  Men see only the great lake, the great sky, the great gray country.  They become moody, fanciful.  In the face of the silence they have little to say.  At Port Rae were old Jock Wilson, the Chief Trader; Father Bonat, the priest; Andrew Levoy, the metis clerk; four Dog Rib teepees; Galen Albret and his bride; and Graehme Stewart.

Jock Wilson was sixty-five; Father Bonat had no age; Andrew Levoy possessed the years of dour silence.  Only Graehme Stewart and Elodie, bride of Albret, were young.  In the great gray country their lives were like spots of color on a mist.  Galen Albret finally became jealous.

At first there was nothing to be done, but finally Levoy brought to the older man proof of the younger’s guilt.  The harsh traveller bowed his head and wept.  But since he loved Elodie more than himself—­which was perhaps the only redeeming feature of this sorry business—­he said nothing, nor did more than to journey south to Edmonton, leaving the younger man alone in Fort Rae to the White Silence.  But his soul was stirred.