At the head of the mound towered a gigantic totem pole, carved and painted with scenes of a most minute history, while at the foot of a smaller stake, alike carved and coloured, bore, one upon another, twelve rings of bone, each one of which stood for the circle of a year.

Crossed and shielded with infinite care, in the centre there lay a set of smith’s tools, crudely fashioned and well worn, tongs and a heavy hammer and a small anvil.

But beyond all this, a thing that held his wondering gaze and brought the fur cap from his head, there stood an altar, rude as the rest, but still an altar of God, with a black iron crucifix, whose pale ivory Christ glimmered in the gathering evening, upright upon it.  Before the crucifix, and at either end, were the burnt-out evidences of tallow candles, while flanking the holy Symbol there stood two wooden crosses, their pieces held together by bindings of thread.  Before one there lay a heap of little withered flowers, frail things of the forest and the spring, and every one was snowy white.  Across the other hung a solitary blossom, first of its kind to open its passionate eyes to the sun, and it was blood-red, counterpart of that wee star which Alfred de Courtenay had snatched from the stockade wall one day in another spring.

The earnest blue eyes of the man were very grave, touched with a deep tenderness.

“Maren!” he whispered reverently; “maid of the splendid heart!”

So deep was he in contemplation of the things before him and his own holy thoughts that he did not hear a soft sound behind him, the fall of a light step.

A breath that was half a gasp turned him on his heel.

Leaning through the parted curtain of the hanging vines, one hand at her throat, the other holding three candles, and her dark eyes wide above her thinned brown cheeks, she stood herself.  At her knee there hung the heavy head of the great dog, Loup.

She, as she had been when first he looked upon her, yet intangibly changed, the same yet not the same.

They stood in silence and looked into each other’s eyes as if void of speech, of motion, held by the mighty yearning that must look and look with insatiable intensity, the half unreal reality of the moment.

And then the stopped breath in the girl’s throat caught itself with a little sound that broke the spell.

The man sprang forward and took her in his arms, not passionately, strongly, as he had done once before, but with a love so high, so chastened, so humble that it gentled his touch to reverence.

“I have come, Maren,” he said brokenly; “I have followed you to the land you sought.  Maid of my heart!  My soul!”

Without words, without question, she yielded herself to his embrace, lifted her face to him and gave into his keeping that which was his from the beginning.

“Mother Mary!  I thank Thee!” he heard her whisper, and when he loosed her to look once more into her level eyes, they were dim with tears.