And now, after he had reached the river again, something held him there.  From the head of the Chute to a bend in the river two miles below, his feet wore a beaten trail.  Three or four times a day he would make the trip, and along the path he set a few snares in which he caught rabbits for food.  Each night he made his bed in a crevice among the rocks at the foot of the Chute.  At the end of a week the old Jim Kent was dead.  Even O’Connor would not have recognized him with his shaggy growth of beard, his hollow eyes, and the sunken cheeks which the beard failed to hide.

And the fighting spirit in him also was dead.  Once or twice there leaped up in him a sudden passion demanding vengeance upon the accursed Law that was accountable for the death of Marette, but even this flame snuffed itself out quickly.

And then, on the eighth day, he saw the edge of a thing that was almost hidden under an overhanging bank.  He fished it out.  It was Marette’s little pack, and for many minutes before he opened it Kent crushed the sodden treasure to his breast, staring with half-mad eyes down where he had found it, as if Marette must be there, too.  Then he ran with it to an open space, where the sun fell warmly on a great, flat rock that was level with the ground, and with sobbing breath he opened it.  It was filled with the things she had picked up quickly in her room the night of their flight from Kedsty’s bungalow, and as he drew them out one by one and placed them in the sun on the rock, a new and sudden rush of life swept through his veins, and he sprang to his feet and faced the river again, as if at last a hope had come to him.  Then he looked down again upon what she had treasured, and reaching out his arms to them, he whispered,

“Marette—­my little goddess—­”

Even in his grief the overwhelming mastery of his love for the one who was dead brought a smile to his. haggard and bearded face.  For Marette, in filling her little pack on that night of hurried flight, had chosen strange things.  On the sunlit rock, where he had placed them, were a pair of the little pumps which he had fallen on his knees to worship in her room, and with these she had crowded into the pack one of the billowing, sweet-smelling dresses which had made his heart stand still for a moment when he first looked into their hiding-place.  It was no longer soft and cobwebby as it had been then, like down fluttering against his cheeks, but sodden and discolored, as it lay on the rock with little rivulets of water running from it.

With the shoes and the dress were the intimate necessities which Marette had taken with her.  But it was one of the pumps that Kent picked up and crushed close to his ragged breast—­one of the two she had worn that first wonderful day she had come to see him at Cardigan’s place.