How long she had been standing there, while the men prepared the mid-day meal, she did not know.  It was a matter of no sort of consequence to her anyway.  Nothing really seemed of any consequence now.  Her jaded mind was obsessed by a horror she could not shake off.  There was nothing, nothing in the world to do but nurse the anguish driving her.

“You’ll come right along and eat, Nancy?”

The girl almost jumped at the gentle tones of the man’s voice, and glanced round at Bull Sternford in an agony of sudden terror.

“I—­I—­” she stammered.  Then composure returned to her.  “If you wish it,” she said submissively.  “But I don’t need food.”

Bull regarded the averted face for moments.  Sympathy and love were in his clear gazing eyes.  He understood something of the thing she was enduring, and the tone of his voice had been a real expression of his feelings.  This girl, with the courage of twenty men, with her radiant beauty, and in her pitiful, heartbroken condition, was far more precious to him than any victory he had set himself to achieve.  He knew that the world held nothing half so precious.

He came a step nearer.

“I wonder if you’ll listen to me, Nancy,” he said, with a hesitation and doubt utterly foreign, to him.  “You know, for all that’s happened, for all we’re mixed up against each other in this war, I’m the same man you found me on the Myra and in Quebec.  I—­”

“Don’t.”

The girl flung out her hands in a piteous appeal.  And Bull recognised the hysteria lying behind the movement.

“I know,” she cried.  “Oh, I know.  But—­don’t you understand?  You must know what I am.  It’s my doing that Laval has gone to his death.  I’m responsible, just as surely as if I’d fired the gun that robbed him of his life.  Oh, why, why didn’t I refuse the work?  Why did they send me?  And those dogs.  Those poor helpless dogs.  They, too.  I must have been mad—­mad.  How can you come near me?  How can you stand there summoning me to eat food—­with you?  It’s useless.  It’s—­I who sent that man to his death—­I who—­”

“Why, I thought it was Gouter.”

Bull’s manner had suddenly changed.  The danger signal in the girl’s eyes had determined him.  So he smiled, and there was laughter in his challenge.

“Say,” he went on rapidly, “if you told that to Gouter he’d be crazy mad.  He’s the boss running shot on Labrador, and if you claimed responsibility for the killing of Laval you’d be dead up against it with him.”  He shook his head.  “No, he’s sort of grieved he didn’t drop him plumb on the instant as it is.  It won’t do you talking that way with him around.”

He watched for the effect of his words and realised a slight relaxing of the strained look in the hazel eyes.  Forthwith he plunged into the thing he contemplated.