Always he felt this mastering certainty of the future when alone with Mary Josephine in the open day.  With her at his side, her hand in his, and his arm about her waist, he told himself that all life was a lie—­that there was no earth, no sun, no song or gladness in all the world, if that world held no hope for him.  It was there.  It was beyond the rim of forest.  It was beyond the yellow plains, beyond the farthest timber of the farthest prairie, beyond the foothills; in the heart of the mountains was its abiding place.  As he had dreamed of those mountains in boyhood and youth, so now he dreamed his dreams over again with Mary Josephine.  For her he painted his pictures of them, as they wandered mile after mile up the shore of the Saskatchewan—­the little world they would make all for themselves, how they would live, what they would do, the mysteries they would seek out, the triumphs they would achieve, the glory of that world—­just for two.  And Mary Josephine planned and dreamed with him.

In a week they lived what might have been encompassed in a year.  So it seemed to Keith, who had known her only so long.  With Mary Josephine the view-point was different.  There had been a long separation, a separation filled with a heartbreak which she would never forget, but it had not served to weaken the bonds between her and this loved one, who, she thought, had always been her own.  To her their comradeship was more complete now than it ever had been, even back in the old days, for they were alone in a land that was strange to her, and one was all that the world held for the other.  So her possessorship of Keith was a thing which—­again in the dark and brooding hours of night—­sometimes made him writhe in an agony of shame.  Hers was a shameless love, a love which had not even the lover’s reason for embarrassment, a love unreserved and open as the day.  It was her trick, nights, to nestle herself in the big armchair with him, and it was her fun to smother his face in her hair and tumble it about him, piling it over his mouth and nose until she made him plead for air.  Again she would fit herself comfortably in the hollow of his arm and sit the evening out with her head on his shoulder, while they planned their future, and twice in that week she fell asleep there.  Each morning she greeted him with a kiss, and each night she came to him to be kissed, and when it was her pleasure she kissed him—­or made him kiss her—­when they were on their long walks.  It was bitter-sweet to Keith, and more frequently came the hours of crushing desolation for him, those hours in the still, dark night when his hypocrisy and his crime stood out stark and hideous in his troubled brain.