I read it over, and over again, but it seemed as if the words would never link themselves together in my brain and form anything tangible. Gone away! Oh, God! Meaghan gone;--Mary gone;--every one to whom my heart goes out leaves me the same way. What is it in me? Oh, my God! my God! I staggered against the veranda rail for support, then, like a blind man groping for a path in a forest, I made my journey across the rustic bridge, and home. I am not ashamed to own it: in my anguish and my physical weakness, I threw myself upon my bed and sobbed; sobbed until my sorrow had spent itself, until my spirit had become numbed and well-nigh impervious to all feeling. In desperation, I threw myself into my work. Never was store kept so clean nor in such a well-stocked condition as mine was; never was home so tidy. I sawed timber, when there were stacks of it cut, piled and dry in my wood sheds. I built rafts. I repaired the wharf. I added barns to my outhouses, when, already, I had barns lying empty. I insisted on delivering the requirements of every family in Golden Crescent, instead of having them take their goods from the store. With no object in view, other than the doing of it, I tackled the wintry winds and the white-tipped breakers, in my little rowing boat, when none other dared venture from the confines of his beach. When the sea came roaring into the Bay, tumbling and foaming, boiling and crawling mountains high, breaking with all its elemental fury, I would dash recklessly into it and swim to Rita's Isle and back, with the carelessness and abandon of one who had nothing to live for. As I look back on it all now, I feel that death was really what I courted. Remonstrances fell on deaf ears. My life was my own,--at least, I thought it was,--my own to do with as I chose. What mattered it to any one if the tiny spark went out? My books had little attraction for me during those wild, mad days. Work, work, work and absorption were all my tireless body and wearied brain craved for; and work was the fuel with which I fed them. I was aware that the minister knew more of Mary's going and her present whereabouts than I did, and, sometimes, I fancied he would gladly have told me what he knew. But he could find no opening in the armour of George Bremner for the lodgment of such information. Rita and he got to know, after a while, that the name of Mary Grant was a locked book and that Mary Grant alone held the key to it. Christmas,--my first Christmas from home;--Christmas that might have been any other time of the year for all the difference it made to me, came and went; and the wild, blustering weather of January, with its bursts and blinks of sunshine, its high winds and angry seas, was well upon us. There had been little to do in and around the store, so I was taking the excuse to row over to Clarks' with their supplies, intending to bring back any eggs they might have for my camp requirements.