The memory brought a chill as of winter cold.  With my back to both doors I stood shuddering over the blue fire.  Whatever logicians may say, we do not reason life’s conclusions out.  Clouds blacken the heavens till there comes the lightning-flash.  So do our intuitions leap unwarned from the dark.  ’Twas thus I seemed to fathom the mystery of those interlopers.  Ben Gillam had been chosen to bring the pirate ship north because his father, of the Hudson’s Bay Company, could screen him from English spies.  Mr. Stocking, of Boston, was another partner to the venture, who could shield Ben from punishment in New England.  But the third partner was hiding inland to defraud the others of the furs.  That was the meaning of Ben’s drunken threats.  Who was the third partner?  Had not Eli Kirke planned trading in the north with Mr. Stocking?  Were the pirates some agents of my uncle?  Did that explain why my life had been three times spared?  One code of morals for the church and another for the trade is the way of many a man; but would the agents of a Puritan deacon murder a rival in the dark of a forest, or lead Indians to massacre the crew of partners, or take furs gotten at the price of a tribe’s extermination?

Turning that question over, I heard the inner door-flap lift.  There was no time to regain the couch, but a quick swerve took me out of the firelight in the shadow of a great wolfskin against the wall.  You will laugh at the old idea of honour, but I had promised not to spy, and I never raised my eyes from the floor.  There was no sound but the gurgling of the spring in the dark and the sharp crackle of the flame.

Thinking the wind had blown the flap, I stepped from hiding.  Something vague as mist held back in shadow.  The lines of a white-clad figure etched themselves against the cave wall.  It floated out, paused, moved forward.

Then I remember clutching at the wolfskin like one clinching a death-grip of reality, praying God not to let go a soul’s anchor-hold of reason.

For when the figure glided into the slant blue rays of the shafted flame it was Hortense—­the Hortense of the dreams, sweet as the child, grave as the grown woman-Hortense with closed eyes and moving lips and hands feeling out in the dark as if playing invisible keys.

She was asleep.

Then came the flash that lighted the clouds of the past.

The interloper, the pirate, the leader of Indian marauders, the defrauder of his partners, was M. Picot, the French doctor, whom Boston had outlawed, and who was now outlawing their outlawry.  We do not reason out our conclusions, as I said before.  At our supremest moments we do not think.  Consciousness leaps from summit to summit like the forked lightnings across the mountain-peaks; and the mysteries of life are illumined as a spread-out scroll.  In that moment of joy and fear and horror, as I crouched back to the wall, I did not think.  I knew—­knew the meaning of all M. Picot’s questionings on the fur trade; of that murderous attack in the dark when an antagonist flung down his weapon; of the spying through the frosted woods; of the figures in the white darkness; of the attempt to destroy Ben Gillam’s fort; of the rescue from the crest of the hill; and of all those strange delirious dreams.