Lying on his back watching the crooked blue spots of the sky through the tree-tops of a Canadian forest, Francis read this letter over and over, and as he did so it seemed strange to him that he had not thought to help Katrine in this way himself. If she ever found out that he had done so she would probably never forgive him, but there were ways, he reasoned, to arrange it so that she could never find out. His decision being made, he acted upon it immediately, and that night two letters, one addressed: MONSIEUR PAUL ROGALLE, de Rogalle, Dupont et Cie, Paris, France, and another: M. JOSEF, Faubourg Saint Honoré, were mailed by him at the neighboring posting-place of Pont du Coeur. The morning after the writing of these letters Frank started farther north, and heard nothing of the outside world for more than a month. At North Point he found a bundle of letters, two from his mother, and another from Doctor Johnston, enclosing the note which Katrine had written him after her father's death. He opened the doctor's first, and at sight of the enclosure his heart, in the homely old phrase, came to his throat. It was a sad letter, thanking the doctor for all he had tried to do, speaking of her father's suffering at some length, parsimonious of detail concerning her own life or future plans. It was ten o'clock in the hunting-hutch. The night outside was starless, the lamps flickered irregularly, the guides lay heavily asleep in their blankets on beds of pine boughs in the corner. It was a strange place for the birth of a man's soul, but as Frank Ravenel read the letter a tenderness, a selfless tenderness, for the sad little writer of it came to him. He had already protected her from himself--"somewhat late," he confessed, with bitterness, and there had been some effort "not to do the worst." But the feeling that held him as he read was different from any he had had before. He dwelt on her lonesomeness in the world: the long nights she must have passed alone watching the coming of death. Unspeakable tenderness brought a sob to his throat and a pain over his heart, as though suffering from a blow. The remembrance of her on the wind-blown hill came back to him; the scarlet handkerchief waved against the blue of the sky, and the brave call over the brown grass: "_Don't think of me!_ Good-bye!" It seemed in some way to have been a cry of victory. He went to the door of the tent straining his eyes into the blackness. Alone in the great woods with the night noises, under the silent stars, things took on a different value. What was he compared to her?