Bateese did not return immediately for the dishes, and for half an hour after he had finished breakfast Carrigan smoked his pipe and watched the blue haze of fires on the far side of the river.  The world was a blaze of sunlit glory.  His imagination carried him across the river.  Somewhere over there, in an open spot where the sun was blazing, Jeanne Marie-Anne was probably drying herself after the night of storm.  There was but little doubt in his mind that she was already heaping the ignominy of blame upon him.  That was the woman of it.

A knock at his door drew him about.  It was a light, quick tap, tap, tap—­not like the fist of either Bateese or Nepapinas.  In another moment the door swung open, and in the flood of sunlight that poured into the cabin stood St. Pierre’s wife!

It was not her presence, but the beauty of her, that held him spellbound.  It was a sort of shock after the vivid imaginings of his mind in which he had seen her beaten and tortured by storm.  Her hair, glowing in the sun and piled up in shining coils on the crown of her head, was not wet.  She was not the rain-beaten little partridge that had passed in tragic bedragglement through his mind.  Storm had not touched her.  Her cheeks were soft with the warm flush of long hours of sleep.  When she came in, her lips greeting him with a little smile, all that he had built up for himself in the hours of the night crumbled away in dust.  Again he forgot for a moment that she was St. Pierre’s wife.  She was woman, and as he looked upon her now, the most adorable woman in all the world.

“You are better this morning,” she said.  Real pleasure shone in her eyes.  She had left the door open, so that the sun filled the room.  “I think the storm helped you.  Wasn’t it splendid?”

David swallowed hard.  “Quite splendid,” he managed to say.  “Have you seen Bateese this morning?”

A little note of laughter came into her throat.  “Yes.  I don’t think he liked it.  He doesn’t understand why I love storms.  Did you sleep well, M’sieu Carrigan?”

“An hour or two, I think.  I was worrying about you.  I didn’t like the thought that I had turned you out into the storm.  But it doesn’t seem to have touched you.”

“No.  I was there—­quite comfortable.”  She nodded to the forward bulkhead of the cabin, beyond the wardrobe closets and the piano.  “There is a little dining-room and kitchenette ahead,” she explained.  “Didn’t Bateese tell you that?”

“No, he didn’t.  I asked him where you were, and I think he told me to shut up.”

“Bateese is very odd,” said St. Pierre’s wife.  “He is exceedingly jealous of me, M’sieu David.  Even when I was a baby and he carried me about in his arms, he was just that way.  Bateese, you know, is older than he appears.  He is fifty-one.”

She was moving about, quite as if his presence was in no way going to disturb her usual duties of the day.  She rearranged the damask curtains which he had crumpled with his hands, placed two or three chairs in their usual places, and moved from this to that with the air of a housewife who is in the habit of brushing up a bit in the morning.