Sitting in darkness thickening with the nearer approach of storm, David recalled the stab of pain mingled with humiliation that had come into the eyes of St. Pierre’s wife when she had stood facing her husband.  He heard again, with a new understanding, the low note of pathos in her voice as in song she had called upon the Mother of Christ to hear her—­and help her.  He had not guessed at the tragedy of it then.  Now he knew, and he thought of her lying awake in the gloom beyond the bulkhead, her eyes were with tears.  And St. Pierre had gone back to his raft, singing in the night!  Where before there had been sympathy for him, there rose a sincere revulsion.  There had been a reason for St. Pierre’s masterly possession of himself, and it had not been, as he had thought, because of his bigness of soul.  It was because he had not cared.  He was a splendid hypocrite, playing his game well at the beginning, but betraying the lie at the end.  He did not love Marie-Anne as he, Dave Carrigan, loved her.  He had spoken of her as a child, and he had treated her as a child, and was serenely dispassionate in the face of a situation which would have roused the spirit in most men.  And suddenly, recalling that thrilling hour in the white strip of sand and all that had happened since, it flashed upon David that St. Pierre was using his wife as the vital moving force in a game of his own—­that under the masquerade of his apparent faith and bigness of character he was sacrificing her to achieve a certain mysterious something it the scheme of his own affairs.

Yet he could not forget the infinite faith Marie-Anne Boulain had expressed in her husband.  There had been no hypocrisy in her waiting and her watching for him, or in her belief that he would straighten out the tangles of the dilemma in which she had become involved.  Nor had there been make-believe in the manner she had left him that day in her eagerness to go to St. Pierre.  Adding these facts as he had added the others, he fancied he saw the truth staring at him out of the darkness of his cabin room.  Marie-Anne loved her husband.  And St. Pierre was merely the possessor, careless and indifferent, almost brutally dispassionate in his consideration of her.

A heavy crash of thunder brought Carrigan back to a realization of the impending storm.  He rose to his feet in the chaotic gloom, facing the bulkhead beyond which he was certain St. Pierre’s wife lay wide awake.  He tried to laugh.  It was inexcusable, he told himself, to let his thoughts become involved in the family affairs of St. Pierre and Marie-Anne.  That was not his business.  Marie-Anne, in the final analysis, did not appear to be especially abused, and her mind was not a child’s mind.  Probably she would not thank him for his interest in the matter.  She would tell him, like any other woman with pride, that it was none of his business and that he was presuming upon forbidden ground.

He went to the window.  There was scarcely a breath of air, and unfastening the screen, he thrust out his head and shoulders into the night.  It was so black that he could not see the shadow of the water almost within reach of his hands, but through the chaos of gloom that lay between him and the opposite shore he made out a single point of yellow light.  He was positive the light was in the cabin on the raft.  And St. Pierre was probably in that cabin.