Gaspard was not a hard man. Rather was he strongly, keenly susceptible of appeal to the æsthetic and emotional elements in his artistic nature. The sight of this woman, young—she was not more than twenty-two—beautiful and pitifully, hopelessly, his slave as well as his victim, moved him deeply. He leaned down over her, lifted her to her feet and, with his arms thrown about her, sought to stay her sobbing. “Don’t, child,” he said. “Don’t cry like that. We will find some way out of the mess, or, by God,” he added with sudden passion, “we’ll make one.” Still sobbing, she leaned against him. The absence of any suggestion of passion in him revealed to her woman’s instinct that the dream that had drawn her from her far north home was madness. She knew she was nothing to him and could be nothing to him. Her very despair quieted her, and she stood, limp and drooping, her eyes on the ground, her hands folded before her. “Come, I will take you to your camp, and tomorrow I will talk with you,” said Gaspard, with a gentle kindness in his voice and manner. The girl roused herself, glanced about to discover her child who was busying himself among the bushes, then turning back to him said with a simple and quiet dignity, “No, you must not come. I do not need you. I must do without you. It is all past. Now you go back to your woman. Tomorrow you will tell me about your boy.” She rolled the child up in his blanket, slung him Indian fashion over her shoulder, picked up her bundle and with never another look at the man and with never a word she took her way. “Tomorrow,” said Gaspard, “I shall see you. Good-bye.” Unheeding, she passed on down the trail, and the underbrush hid her from his sight. CHAPTER IV The burden upon the man’s soul grew heavier with every step homeward. He was going to meet his wife, the woman he had wronged, the woman who was to him the very centre of his being, the dearest of all he possessed in life, without whose respect and love life would lose its meaning and value. As to the Indian woman and her wrong, truth to tell, though he pitied her, he felt no very acute concern. True enough, the astonishing advance she had made during the past five years in the white man’s civilisation and culture had given her a new place in his consideration. She was no longer an ignorant squaw whose rights and wrongs could be estimated in terms purely materialistic. She had developed a mind and a soul. The memory of that appeal of hers for her son, for his son, calm, dignified, pungent, still shook him. But his chief concern now was how to bury this whole wretched business from the knowledge of his wife beyond possibility of resurrection. The picture of his wife’s face following the possible revelation of his sin halted him in his stride and wrung from his soul’s depths a groan. “My God! My God!” he cried aloud, lifting his hands heavenward. “Let that never come! Let that never come!”