“Then there is something more—­than the baby?”

“Yes,” she replied, and dropped her hands from his shoulders.  “There is that of which I warned you—­something which you could not know if you lived a thousand years.”

He caught her to him now, so close that his breath swept her face.

“Josephine, if it was the baby alone, you would give yourself to me?  You would be my wife?”

“Yes.”

Strength leaped back into him, the strength that made her love him.  He freed her and stood back from the log, his face ablaze with the old fighting spirit.  He laughed, and held out his arms without taking her.

“Then you have not killed my hope!” he cried.

His enthusiasm, the strength and sureness of him as he stood before her, sent the flush back into her own face.  She rose, and reached to one of his outstretched hands with her own.

“You must hope for nothing more than I have given you,” she said.  “A month from to-day you will leave Adare House, and will never return.”

“A month!” He breathed the words as if in a dream.

“Yes, a month from to-day.  You will go off on a snowshoe journey.  You will never return, and they will think that you have died in the deep snows.  You have promised me this.  And you will not fail me?”

“What I have promised I will do,” he replied, and his voice was now as calm as her own.  “And for this one month—­you are mine!”

“To love as I have given you love, yes.”

For a moment he folded her in his arms; and then he drew back her hood so that he might lay a hand on her shining hair, and his eyes were filled with a wonderful illumination as he looked into her upturned face.

“A month is a long time, my Josephine,” he whispered.  “And after that month there are other months—­years and years of them, and through years, if it must be, my hope will live.  You cannot destroy it, and some day, somewhere, you will send word to me.  Will you promise to do that?”

“If such a thing becomes possible, yes.”

“Then I am satisfied,” he said.  “I am going to fight for you, Josephine.  No man ever fought for a woman as I am going to fight for you.  I don’t know what this strange thing is that separates us.  But I can think of nothing terrible enough to frighten me.  I am going to fight, mentally and physically, day and night—­until you are my own.  I cannot lose you now.  That will be what God never meant to be.  I shall keep all my promises to you.  You have given me a month, and much can happen in that time.  If at the end of the month I have failed—­I will go.  But you will not send me away.  For I shall win!”

So sure was he, so filled with the conviction of his final triumph, so like a god to her in this moment of his greatest strength, that Josephine drew slowly away from him, her breath coming quickly, her eyes filled with the star-like pride and glory of the Woman who has found a Master.  For a moment they stood facing each other in the white stillness of the forest, and in that moment there came to them the low and mourning wail of a dog beyond them.  And then the full voice of the pack burst through the wilderness, a music that was wild and savage, and yet through which there ran a strange and plaintive note for Josephine.