A whimsical half-smile was trembling on her lips again, and a warmer glow came into her eyes.  “Do you know,” she said, “that according to an old and sacred code of the North you belong to me?”

“I have heard of that code,” he replied.  “A hundred years ago I should have been your slave.  If it exists today, I am happy.”

“Yes, you see the point, Jeems, don’t you?  You were about to die, probably.  I think they would have hanged you.  And I saved your life.  Therefore your life belongs to me, for I insist that the code still lives.  You are my property, and I am going to do with you as I please, until I turn you over to the Rivers.  And you are not going tonight.  You shall wait here for Laselle and his brigade.”

“Laselle—­Jean Laselle?”

She nodded.  “Yes, that is why you must wait.  We have made a splendid arrangement.  When Laselle and his brigade start north, you go with them.  And no one will ever know.  You are safe here.  No one will think of looking for you under the roof of the Inspector of Police.”

“But you, Marette!” He caught himself, remembering her injunction not to question her.  Marette shrugged her slim shoulders the slightest bit and nodded for him to look upon what she knew he had already seen, her room.

“It is not uncomfortable,” she said.  “I have been here for a number of weeks, and nothing has happened to me.  I am quite safe.  Inspector Kedsty has not looked inside that door since the day your big red-headed friend saw me down in the poplars.  He has not put a foot on the stair.  That is the dead-line.  And—­I know—­you are wondering.  You are asking yourself a great many questions—­a bon droit, M’sieu Jeems.  You are burning up with them.  I can see it.  And I—­”

There was something suddenly pathetic about her, as she sank into the big-armed, upholstered chair which had been Kedsty’s favorite reading chair.  She was tired, and for a moment it seemed to Kent that she was almost ready to cry.  Her ringers twisted nervously at the shining end of the braid in her lap, and more than ever he thought how slim and helpless, she was, yet how gloriously unafraid, how unconquerable with that something within her that burned like the fire of a dynamo.  The flame of that force had gone down now, as though the fire itself was dying out; but when she raised her eyes to him, looking up at him from out of the big chair, he knew that back of the yearning, child-like glow that lay in them the heart of that fire was living and unquenchable.  Again, for him, she had ceased to be a woman.  It was the soul of a child that lay in her wide-open, wonderfully blue eyes.  Twice before he had seen that miracle, and it held him now, as it had held him that first time when she had stood with her back at Cardigan’s door.  And as it had changed then, so it changed now, slowly, and she was a woman again, with that great gulf of unapproachableness between them.  But the yearning was still there, revealing itself to him, and yet, like the sun, infinitely remote from him.