Father Charles paused, to peer through the window out into the black night, where the pine-trees were sobbing and moaning now.  When he turned, Forsythe, the timber agent, whose life was a wilderness life, nodded understandingly.

“And when they cry like that,” went on Father Charles, “a living voice would be lost among them as the splash of a pebble is lost in the roaring sea.  A hundred times that night I fancied that I heard human voices; and a dozen times I went to my door, drew back the bolt, and listened, “with the snow and the wind beating about my ears.

“As I sat shuddering before my fire, there came a thought to me of a story which I had long ago read about the sea—­a story of impossible achievement and of impossible heroism.  As vividly as if I had read it only the day before, I recalled the description of a wild and stormy night when the heroine placed a lighted lamp in the window of her sea-bound cottage, to guide her lover home in safety.  Gentlemen, the reading of that book in my boyhood days was but a trivial thing.  I had read a thousand others, and of them all it was possibly the least significant; but the Supreme Arbiter had not forgotten.

“The memory of that book brought me to my feet, and I placed a lighted lamp close up against my cabin window.  Fifteen minutes later I heard a strange sound at the door, and when I opened it there fell in upon the floor at my feet a young and beautiful woman.  And after her, dragging himself over the threshold on his hands and knees, there came a man.

“I closed the door, after the man had crawled in and fallen face downward upon the floor, and turned my attention first to the woman.  She was covered with snow.  Her long, beautiful hair was loose and disheveled, and had blown about her like a veil.  Her big, dark eyes looked at me pleadingly, and in them there was a terror such as I had never beheld in human eyes before.  I bent over her, intending to carry her to my cot; but in another moment she had thrown herself upon the prostrate form of the man, with her arms about his head, and there burst from her lips the first sounds that she had uttered.  They were not much more intelligible than the wailing grief of the pine-trees out in the night, but they told me plainly enough that the man on the floor was dearer to her than life.

“I knelt beside him, and found that he was breathing in a quick, panting sort of way, and that his wide-open eyes were looking at the woman.  Then I noticed for the first time that his face was cut and bruised, and his lips were swollen.  His coat was loose at the throat, and I could see livid marks on his neck.

“‘I’m all right,’ he whispered, struggling for breath, and turning his eyes to me.  ’We should have died—­in a few minutes more—­if it hadn’t been for the light in your window!’