Those were terrible days for Humphrey—­days of a loneliness that was beyond anything he had experienced before.  His brother was near him in the flesh, but severed from him by a whole world of fevered imaginings.  Sometimes Humphrey found it in his heart to wish that the Indians would come back and make a final end of them both.  All hope and zest and joy in life seemed to have been taken from him at one blow.  He could neither think of the happy past without pangs of pain, nor yet face a future which seemed barren of hope and promise.

He could only sit beside his brother, tend him, nurse him, pray for him.  But the words of prayer too often died away upon his lips.  Had they not all prayed together, after the godly habit of the household, upon the very morning when this awful disaster fell upon them?  Were these vast solitudes too far away for God to hear the prayers that went up from them?

Humphrey had never known what awful loneliness could engulf the human spirit till he sat beside the fevered man in the vast solitude of the primeval forest, asking in his heart whether God Himself had not forsaken them.

It was the hour of sundown, and Humphrey had gone outside for a breath of fresh air.  He looked ten years older than he had done a few days back, when he had come whistling through the forest track, expecting to see the children bounding forth to meet him.  His eyes were sunken, his face was pale and haggard, his dress was unkempt and ragged.  There were no clever fingers now to patch tattered raiment, and keep things neat and trim.

There was an unwonted sound in the forest!  It was distant still.  To some ears it would have been inaudible; but Humphrey heard it, and his heart suddenly beat faster.

The sound was that of approaching steps—­the steps of men.  A few minutes more and he heard the sound of voices, too.  He had been about to dash into the shed for his gun, but the fresh sounds arrested his movement.

He had ears as sharp as those of an ambushed Indian, and he detected in a moment that the men who were approaching the clearing were of his own nationality.  The words he could not hear, but he could distinguish the intonation.  It was not the rapid, thin-sounding French tongue; it was English—­he was certain of it!  And a light leaped to his eyes at the bare thought of meeting a brother countryman in this desolate place.

Probably it was some other settler, one of that hardy race that fringed the colony on its western frontier.  Miles and miles of rolling forest lay between these scattered holdings, and since war was but lately begun, nothing had been done for the protection of the hapless people now becoming an easy prey of the Indians stirred up to molest them.

Humphrey knew none of their neighbours.  Forest travelling was too difficult and dangerous to tempt the settler far away from his own holding.  If it were one of these coming now, most likely he too had suffered from attack or fear of attack, and was seeking a friend in the nearest locality.