“My name is Crossman,” the other answered.  “I am new to the North.”

“Ah, so?  I am the Cure of Portage Dernier, but, as you see, I must wander after my lambs—­very great goats are they, many of them, and the winter brings the logging.  So I, too, take to the timber.  My team,” he waved an introducing hand at the two great cross-bred sled-dogs that unhooked from their traces had followed him in and now sat gravely on their haunches, staring at the fire.  “You are an overseer for the company?” suggested the Cure, politely curious—­“or perhaps you cruise?”

Crossman shook his head.  “No, mon pere.  I came up here to get well.”

“Ah,” said the Cure, sympathetically tapping his lung.  “In this air of the evergreens and the new wood, in the clean cold—­it is the world’s sanatorium—­you will soon be yourself again.”

Crossman smiled painfully.  “Perhaps here”—­he laid a long, slender finger on his broad chest—­“but I heal not easily of the great world sickness—­the War.  It has left its mark!  The War, the great malady of the world.”

“You are right.”  Meditatively the Priest threw aside his cape and began unfastening the safety-pins that held up his cassock.  “You say well.  It strikes at the heart.”

Crossman nodded.

“Yet it passes, my son, and Nature heals; as long as the hurt be in Nature, Nature will take care.  And you have come where Nature and God work together.  In this great living North Country, for sick bodies and sick souls, the good God has His good sun and His clean winds.”  He nodded reassurance, and Crossman’s dark face cleared of its brooding.

“Sit down, Father.”  He advanced a chair.

“So,” murmured the Cure, continuing his thought as he sank into the embrace of thong and withe.  “So you were in the War, and did you take hurt there, my son?”

Crossman nodded.  “Trench pneumonia, and then the rat at the lung; but of shock, something also.  But I think it was not concussion, as the doctors said, but soul-shock.  It has left me, Father, like Mohammed’s coffin, suspended.  I think I have lost my grip on the world—­and not found my hold on another.”

“Shock of the soul,” the Priest ruminated.  “Your soul is bruised, my son.  We must take care of it.”  His voice trailed off.  There was silence in the little office broken only by the yawn and snuffle of the sled-dogs.

Suddenly the door swung open.  In the embrasure stood Aurore in her red mackinaw and corduroy trousers.  A pair of snowshoes hung over her back, and her hand gripped a short-handled broad axe.  Her great eyes turned from Crossman to the Cure, and across her crimson mouth crept her slow smile.  The Cure sprang to his feet at sight of her, his face went white, and the lines from nose to lips seemed to draw in.

“Aurore!” he exclaimed; “Aurore!”

“Oui, mon pere,” she drawled.  “It is Aurore.”  She struck a provocative pose, her hand on her hip, her head thrown back, while her eyes changed colour as alexandrite in the sun.