calm and quiet with their hands folded across their breasts.  A great company it was, and a great graveyard, strewed over with sleeping shapes, all at rest and quiet, waiting till they hear the trumpet of the archangel sounding so that even the dead will hear and live again.  It was a solemn sight to see, doctor.  Somehow I came to think it would not be altogether a bad thing for the poor young troubled creature to go down there among them and be at rest.  There are some people who seem too tender and delicate for this world.  Yet if there had come a chance I’d have laid down my life for hers, even then, when I knew nothing much about her.”

“Tardif,” I said, “I did not know what a good fellow you are, though I ought to have known it by this time.”

“No,” he answered, “it is not in me; it’s something in her.  You feel something of it yourself, doctor, or how could you stay in a poor little house like this, thinking of nothing but her, and not caring about the weather keeping you away from home?  But let me go on.  In the morning she came on deck, and talked to me about the islands, and where she could live cheaply, and it ended in her coming home here to lodge in our little spare room.  There was another curious thing—­she had not any luggage with her, not a box nor a bag of any kind.  She never knew that I knew, for that would have troubled her.  It is my belief that she has run away.”

“But who can she have run away from, Tardif?” I asked.

“God knows,” he answered, “but the girl has suffered; you can see that by her face.  Whoever or whatever she has run away from, her cheeks are white from it, and her heart sorrowful.  I know nothing of her secret; but this I do know:  she is as good, and true, and sweet a little soul as my poor little wife was.  She has been here all winter, doctor, living under my eye, and I’ve waited on her as her servant, though a rough servant I am for one like her.  She has tried to make herself cheerful and contented with our poor ways.  See, she mended me that bit of net; those are her meshes, though her pretty white fingers were made sore by the twine.  She would mend it, sitting where you are now in the chimney-corner.  No; if mam’zelle should die, it will be a great grief of heart to me.  If I could offer my life to God in place of hers, I’d do it willingly.”

“No, she will not die.  Look there, Tardif!” I said, pointing to the door-sill of the inner room.  A white card had been slipped under the door noiselessly—­a signal agreed upon between Mother Renouf and me, to inform me that my patient had at last fallen into a profound slumber, which seemed likely to continue some hours.  She had slept perhaps a few minutes at a time before, but not a refreshing, wholesome sleep.  Tardif understood the silent signal as well as I did, and a more solemn expression settled on his face.  After a while he put away his pipe, and, stepping barefoot across the floor without a sound, he stopped the clock, and brought back to the table, where an oil-lamp was burning, a large old Bible.  Throughout the long night, whenever I awoke, for I threw myself on the fern bed and slept fitfully, I saw his handsome face, with its rough, unkempt hair falling across his forehead as it was bent over the book, while his mouth moved silently as he read to himself chapter after chapter, and turned softly the pages before him.