“If I believed that the Mary had gone down, it is a very miserable woman I should be to-day,” said Mrs. Jenkin, who was swaying gently in a rocking-chair, “for Stee is a good husband, though perhaps he hasn’t always been as straight as he ought to have been.  But that was when Oily Dave was in power here.  It is like master, like man, you know, and Stee is desperate easy led, either wrong or right.”

“If only we knew that the Mary was safe!” moaned poor Katherine.

“I should know if it wasn’t,” Mrs. Jenkin answered confidently.  Then she hesitated, turned very red in the face, and burst into impetuous speech:  “I knew Stee was in danger that night last winter when he and Oily Dave went through the snow to steal goods from your cache, and the wolves set upon them.  I perspired in sheer horror that night, though I knew nothing about what was afoot, and I knelt praying on the floor till Stee came home with his clothes all torn, and told me what he had been through.  Ah! that was a dark and dreadful night; may I never see such another.”

“I do not think you will,” said Katherine softly.  She spoke with conviction, too, for certainly Stee Jenkin had been a very different individual since that time.

Mrs. Jenkin wiped her eyes with a pinafore of Valerie’s, which happened to lie handy.  “I don’t believe in that saying about love being blind,” she remarked, with considerable energy.  “I know that I have been able to see Stee’s faults plain enough, and yet he is all the world to me.  Yes, dear, you had better be wed to a faulty man that you really love, than be tied up to an angel that you don’t love.”

Katherine rose and began to struggle into her long wet mackintosh.  “I would have stayed if you had really needed me,” she said; “but all the while you can hope you are not to be pitied.”

“Thank you, thank you, Miss Radford, good of you to come,” said the little woman.  Stee isn’t dead yet, or I must have known it. believe he has been in danger even.”

“If only I could feel like that!” murmured Katherine to herself, as she went out into the driving rain once more.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The Gladness

Six days went by.  The weather had cleared as if by magic, a brilliant sun shone every day in a cloudless sky, and summer had returned again to cheer the northern land.  But never a word had come from across the waste of grey, heaving waters, to let the anxious watchers at Seal Cove know whether the Mary still lived, or whether her crew had really gone to the bottom from the little boat which Oily Dave and his mates had found floating keel upwards.

Mrs. Jenkin still preserved her attitude of determined cheerfulness, and persisted in her belief that no harm had come to the vessel or the men.  But she was the only one who still hoped.  Mrs. Jones, the wife of Nick Jones, a woman shunned by her neighbours, and of a disposition the reverse of friendly, had already put on black.  Her mourning garments were of ancient make, for up-to-date mourning apparel was not regarded as one of the necessaries of life, and so it was not stocked by the store at Roaring Water Portage.