For the first time he spoke the name which she had given him permission to use.  And she noticed it.  He could not help seeing that—­a flashing instant in which the indefinable confession of it was in her face, as though his use of it had surprised her, or pleased her, or both.  Then it was gone.

She did not answer, but rose from the big chair, and went to the window, and stood with her back toward him, looking out over the river.  And then, suddenly, they heard a voice.  It was the voice he had heard twice in his sickness, the voice that had roused him from his sleep last night, crying out in his room for Black Roger Audemard.  It came to him distinctly through the open door in a low and moaning monotone.  He had not taken his eyes from the slim figure of St. Pierre’s wife, and he saw a little tremor pass through her now.

“I heard that voice—­again—­last night,” said David.  “It was in this cabin, asking for Black Roger Audemard.”

She did not seem to hear him, and he also turned so that he was looking at the open door of the cabin.

The sun, pouring through in a golden flood, was all at once darkened, and in the doorway—­framed vividly against the day—­was the figure of a man.  A tense breath came to Carrigan’s lips.  At first he felt a shock, then an overwhelming sense of curiosity and of pity.  The man was terribly deformed.  His back and massive shoulders were so twisted and bent that he stood no higher than a twelve-year-old boy; yet standing straight, he would have been six feet tall if an inch, and splendidly proportioned.  And in that same breath with which shock and pity came to him, David knew that it was accident and not birth that had malformed the great body that stood like a crouching animal in the open door.  At first he saw only the grotesqueness of it—­the long arms that almost touched the floor, the broken back, the twisted shoulders—­and then, with a deeper thrill, he saw nothing of these things but only the face and the head of the man.  There was something god-like about them, fastened there between the crippled shoulders.  It was not beauty, but strength—­the strength of rock, of carven granite, as if each feature had been chiseled out of something imperishable and everlasting, yet lacking strangely and mysteriously the warm illumination that comes from a living soul.  The man was not old, nor was he young.  And he did not seem to see Carrigan, who stood nearest to him.  He was looking at St. Pierre’s wife.

The look which David saw in her face was infinitely tender.  She was smiling at the misshapen hulk in the door as she might have smiled at a little child.  And David, looking back at the wide, deep-set eyes of the man, saw the slumbering fire of a dog-like worship in them.  They shifted slowly, taking in the cabin, questing, seeking, searching for something which they could not find.  The lips moved, and again he heard that weird and mysterious monotone, as if the plaintive voice of a child were coming out of the huge frame of the man, crying out as it had cried last night, “Has-any-one-seen-black-Roger-Audemard?”