Hartley had wakened the woman from her stupor, and in broken French, rich with the idiom of the seventeenth century, she was explaining in her dead voice that she had tried to make her way on foot to Ste. Anne, that if she once reached the shrine of the blessed saint she knew her boy would be saved. Two of them had died, of the black sickness; he was all she had left! And in a fresh paroxysm of grief she caught the sick child once more up to her bent body, and swayed back and forth with it in hopeless despair. Hartley sent Cordelia hurriedly to the nearest farm-house, for a conveyance. Impatient at the delay while the _habitant_ harnessed his stocky little pony to a cart, he helped the woman to her feet, and taking the child in his own arms, started back for the village, not a mile distant. There he sent a messenger post-haste to Ste. Anne's, and an hour later the ponderous little wagon that did service as ambulance for the convent of the Franciscan Sisters at Beaupré was speeding homeward with both mother and child, and Hartley and Cordelia were waiting on the chilly little wind-swept platform for the Quebec train, intangibly detached from one another and mysteriously depressed in spirits. It was not until the warmth and lights of the hotel had shut out the night from them that either cared to talk. Then, of a sudden, Hartley found the woman at his side shaken with a passionate burst of seemingly inconsequential weeping. "Cordelia, what is it?" he cried, in startled wonder. "Motherhood!" said Cordelia, inadequately, through her tears--"it--it is such an awful thing!" And then she fled from him, and he sat up late into the night, thinking. CHAPTER XXVII THE SCARS OF SLAVERY And from the gloomy caves of Mem'ry came The bandits of Repentance in the night And left her naked, and in spirit torn. JOHN HARTLEY, "Street Dust." Every Klondike of achievement has its Chilkoot of adversity.--"The Silver Poppy." The next afternoon they were on the Grand Battery, leaning against one of the obsolete old mortars that frowned down over the river. A calm sky of robin's-egg blue stretched over them. Golden and quiet as were the Laurentides about them, there was a touch of chilliness in that clear, northern air, a muffled coldness which Hartley likened to a naked saber-blade buried in rose-leaves. The wide St. Lawrence lay beneath them like a pool of silver. In the remoter distance stretched the blue and purple foot-hills of the Laurentians themselves.