“What I can’t see—­” Philip was stopped by the doctor’s lifted hand.

“You see, I am relying on your word of honor, Phil,” he explained, laughing softly at the amazement which he saw in the other’s face.  “It’s all so wonderful that I want you to know the end of it, and how happily it has turned out for me—­and the little woman waiting for me back home.  It was I and not Falkner who cried out just before you turned the lamp-wick down.  A letter had fallen from his coat pocket, and it was one of my letters—­sent through my agent.  Understand?  I sent you for the ice, and while you were gone I told him who I was, and he told me why I had never heard from him, and why he was in Pierre Thoreau’s cabin.  My agent had sent him north with five hundred dollars as a first payment.  To cut a long story short, he got into a card game in Prince Albert—­as the best of us do at times—­and as a result become mixed up in a quarrel, in which he pretty nearly killed a man.  They’ve been after him ever since, and almost had him when we found him, injured by a blow which he received in an ugly fall earlier in the night.  It’s the last and total wrecking of my theory.”

“But the girl—­” urged Philip.

“We’re going to see her now, and she will tell you the whole story as she told it to me,” said the doctor, as calmly as before.  “Ah, but it’s wonderful, man—­this great, big, human love that fills the world!  They two met at Nelson House, as I had planned they should, and four months after that they smashed my theory by being married by a missionary from York Factory.  I mean that they smashed the bad part of it, Phil, but all three couples proved the other—­that there exist no such things as ’soul affinities,’ and that two normal people of opposite sexes, if thrown together under certain environment, will as naturally mate as two birds, and will fight and die for one another afterward, too.  There may not be one in ten thousand who believes it, but I do—­still.  At the last moment the man in Falkner triumphed over his love and he told her what he was, that up until the moment he met her he drank and gambled, and that for his shooting a man in Prince Albert he would sooner or later get a term in prison.  And she?  I tell you that she busted my theory to a frazzle!  She loved him, as I now believe every woman in the world is capable of loving, and she married him, and stuck to him through thick and thin, fled with him when he was compelled to run—­and her faith in him now is like that of a child in its God.  For a time they lived in that cabin above Pierre Thoreau’s, and perhaps they wouldn’t have been found out if they hadn’t come up to Fort Smith for a holiday.  Falkner told me that his pursuers would surely stop at Pierre’s, and d his wife.  By this time he has a good start for the States, and will be there by the time I get his wife down.”

Philip had not spoken a word.  Almost mechanically he pulled the photograph from his pocket.