Tears streamed unheeded from her eyes as she recalled the unconscious pathos of his words as he stood beside his mother’s grave.  And the look of reproach with which he sank, to the ground when Lapierre’s bullet laid him low.  Her heart thrilled at the memory of the blazing wrath of him, the cold gleam of his eyes, the wicked snap of his iron jaw, as he said, “I have taken the man-trail!” She remembered the words he had once spoken:  “When you have learned the North, we shall be friends.”  She wondered now if possibly this thing could ever be?  Had she learned the North?  Could she ever atone in his eyes for her cocksureness, her blind egotism?

Chloe quickened her pace, as if to walk away and leave these things behind.  How she hated herself!  It seemed to her, in her shame and mortification, that she could never look into this man’s eyes again.  Her glance strayed to the portrait of Tiger Elliston that stared down at her from its bullet-shattered frame upon the wall.  The eyes of the portrait seemed to bore deep into her own, and the words of MacNair flashed through her brain—­the words he had used as he gazed into the eyes of that selfsame portrait.

Unconsciously—­fiercely she repeated those words aloud:  “By God!  Yon is the face of a man!” She started at the sound of her own voice.  And then, like liquid flame, it seemed to the girl the blood of Tiger Elliston seethed and boiled in her veins—­spurring her on to do!

“Do what?” she questioned.  “What was there left to do, for one who had blundered so miserably?”

Like a flash came the answer.  She had done MacNair a great wrong.  She must right that wrong, or at least admit it.  She must own her error and offer an apology.

Seating herself at the table, she seized a pen and wrote rapidly for a long, long time.  And then for a long time more she sat buried in thought, and at the end of an hour she arose and tore up the pages she had written, and sat down again and penned another letter which she placed in an envelope addressed with the name of MacNair.  This done she took the letter, tiptoed across the living-room, and pushing open the Louchoux girl’s door entered and seated herself upon the edge of the bed.  The Indian girl was wide awake.  A brown hand stole from beneath the covers and clasped reassuringly about Chloe’s fingers.

She handed the girl the letter.

“I can trust you,” she said, “to place this in MacNair’s hands.  Go to sleep now, I will talk further with you tomorrow.”  And with a hurried good-night, Chloe returned to her own room.

She blew out the lamp and threw herself fully dressed upon the bed.  Sleep would not come.  She stared long at the little patch of moonlight that showed upon the bare floor.  She tried to think, but her heart was filled with a strange restlessness.  Arising from the bed, she crossed to the window and stared out across the moonlit clearing toward the dark edge of the forest—­the mysterious forest whose depths seemed black with sinister mystery—­whose trees bed-coned, stretching out their branches like arms.