Crossman shivered.  He knew that world-old formula of hate; he knew of its almost innocent use in many a white caban, but its older, deeper meaning of demoniacal incantation rushed to his mind, somehow blending with the wizardry with which he surrounded his thoughts of the strange woman.

A step outside crunching in the snow.  The door opened, revealing Antoine Marceau.  The huge form of the log-brander towered above him.  He could not read the expression of the eyes behind the square-cupped snow spectacles.

“She tell me, Aurore,” he rumbled, “that I am to come.  We have the company.”

“Yes, the Cure of Portage Dernier.”  Crossman watched him narrowly.

Antoine took off the protecting wooden blinders and thrust them in his pocket.

Crossman stood aside, hesitating.  Antoine drew off his mittens with businesslike precision, and placed a huge, capable hand on a pot-lid, lifted it, and eyed the contents of the saucepan.

“The Cure, he like ptarmigan,” he observed, “but,” he added in a matter-of-fact voice, “the Cure like not Aurore—­he have tell you, hein?  Ah, well, why not?  For him such as Aurore are not—­voila.”

“The Cure says she is a devil.”  Crossman marvelled at his temerity, yet he hung on the answer.

“Why not?  For him, as I have say, she is not—­for me, for you, ma frien’, that is different.”  Antoine turned on him eyes as impersonal as those of Fate; where Crossman had expected to see animosity there was none, only a strange brotherhood of pitying understanding.

“For who shall forbid that the dawn she shall break—­hein?” he continued.  “The Cure?  Not mooch.  When the Dawn she come, she come; not with his hand can he hold her back.  For me, now comes perhaps the sunset; perhaps the dawn for you.  But what would you?  Who can put the dog-harness on the wind, or put the bit in the teeth of the waterfall to hold him up?”

“Or who with his hand can draw the Borealis from heaven?” Crossman cut in.  He spoke unconsciously.  He had not wished to say that, he had not wanted to speak at all, but his subconscious mind had welded the thought of her so fast to the great mystery of the Northern Lights that without volition he had voiced it.

Antoine Marceau nodded quietly.  The strangely aloof acknowledgment of Crossman’s possible relation to this woman, his woman, who yet was not his or any man’s, somehow shocked Crossman.  His blood flamed at the thought, and yet he felt her intangible, unreal.  He had but to look into her shifting, glittering eyes, and there were silence and playing lights.  Suddenly his vision of her changed, became human and vital.  He saw before him the sinuous movement of her strong young body.  He realized the living perfume of her, clean and fresh, faintly aromatic as of pine in the sunlight, and violets in the shadow.

Antoine Marceau busied himself about the cook-house.  He did not speak of Aurore again, not even when his eye rested on the paper doll skewered to the door by the deep-driven knife.  He frowned, made the sign of the cross, jerked out the knife, and thrust its point in the purifying blaze of the charcoal fire.  But he made no comment.