She was gazing out into the black void as she spoke, and the slowly clearing skies permitted the starlight to gleam in her dark eyes and reveal the soft contour of her cheek.

“You do not understand that?” she questioned finally, as I failed to break the silence.

“I have no such pleasant memory to look back upon,” I answered; “yet I can feel, though possibly in a different way, your longing after better things.”

“You realize this sense of loneliness?—­this absence of all that makes life beautiful and worth the living?”

“Perhaps not that,—­for life, even here, is well worth living, and to my eyes the great sea yonder, and the dark forests, are of more interest than city streets.  But in one sense I may enter into your meaning; my thought also is away from here,—­it is with a home, scarcely less humble than are our present surroundings, yet it contains the one blessing worth striving after—­love.”

“Love!” she echoed the unexpected word almost scornfully. “’T is a phrase so lightly spoken that I scarce know what it may signify to you.  You love some one then, Monsieur?” and she looked up at me curiously.

“My mother, Mademoiselle.”

I saw the expression upon her face change instantly.  “Your pardon,” she exclaimed, hastily. “’T was not the meaning I had thought.  I know something of such love as that, and honor you for thus expressing it.”

“I have often wondered, since first we met, at your being here, seemingly alone, at this outermost post of the frontier.  It seems a strange home for one of your refinement and evident delight in social life.”

“’T is not from choice, Monsieur.  My mother died when I was but a child, as I have already told you.  I scarce have memory of her, yet I bear her name, and, I am told, inherit many of her peculiarities.  She was the daughter of a great merchant at Montreal, and the blood of a noble family of France flowed in her veins.  She gave up all else to become my father’s wife; nor did she ever live to regret it.”

Her voice was so low and plaintive that I hesitated to speak; yet finally, as she ceased, and silence fell between us, I asked another question: 

“And ’t was then you voyaged into this wilderness with your father?”

“I have never since left him while he lived,” she answered softly, her head resting upon her hand.  “But he also has gone now, and I merely wait opportunity to journey eastward.”

“He was a trader, you told me once?”

“A soldier first, Monsieur; a true and gallant soldier, but later he traded with the Indians for furs.”

I felt that she was weeping softly, although I could see but little, and I leaned in silence against the rough logs, gazing out into the black night, hesitating to break in upon her grief.  Then a voice spoke rapidly at the farther end of the stockade, and a sudden glow of light shot like an arrow along the platform.  I turned quickly, and there in the open doorway, clearly outlined against the candle flame, stood De Croix.