“But I don’t like you having such hard, rough things to do, Katherine.  I wish you and Miles could change places in age,” he said, with a sigh.

“I don’t,” she answered with a shrug.  “But you must go to sleep now, Father, or you will be feverish to-morrow.  Do the bruises hurt much?” she asked tenderly.

“The bed is full of sore places,” he answered, with a whimsical transposition of terms.  “But I shall go to sleep presently, I think.”

“And wake up in the morning feeling better, I hope,” she forced herself to say brightly, though it worried her to see how ill he was looking.

“I don’t know about that,” he said gravely.  “When a man has lived a hard life like mine, a knock-down blow, such as I have had to-day, very often sets a lot of mischief in motion; but there is no need to fear disaster until it actually comes.  Get away to your bed now, child.  I shan’t want anything more until the morning.”

Katherine bent and kissed him.  With all the strength of her heart she loved her father.  In her early girlhood he had been her hero.  Since her mother’s death he had been her good comrade, and never had there been a shadow between them until that day when they had taken the last mail of the season up to the second portage, and heard the news about the change in the ownership of the fishing fleet from Astor M’Kree.  Perhaps he had been taken with some feeling of illness that day, and this continuing ever since had led to his altered ways and gloomy looks.  But even with this idea to comfort her Katherine went to her bed with a heavy heart that night, and a dread of the morning to which before she had been a stranger.  Her father had said that it was of no use to fear disaster until it really came, but her heart quailed that night as she lay sleepless, thinking of the days which stretched in front of her.  Until her father grew strong again she would have to let the day teaching go, even though it might be possible to keep the night school together.  Her days would have to be spent in buying and selling, in bartering barrels of flour and pork for skins of wolf, of ermine, and of beaver.  She would have to stand between home and the difficulties that menaced from the outside, and if her heart failed her who could wonder at it?

CHAPTER V

A Sacred Confidence

’Duke Radford was very ill.  For a week he hovered between life and death, and Mrs. Burton’s skill was taxed to the uttermost.  There was no doctor within at least a hundred miles.  One of the fishers at Seal Cove had set the broken collar bone, the work being very well done too, although the man was only an amateur in the art of bone-setting.  But it was not the broken bone, nor any of his bruises and abrasions, which made ’Duke Radford’s peril during that black week of care and anxiety.  He was ill in himself, so ill in fact that Mrs. Burton lost heart, declaring that her father’s constitution had broken up, and that half a dozen doctors could not pull him through if his time had come.