In the course of nature and of time Galen Albret had a daughter, but lost a wife.  It was no longer necessary for him to leave his wrong unavenged.  Then began a series of baffling hindrances which resulted finally in his stooping to means repugnant to his open sense of what was due himself.  At the first he could not travel to his enemy because of the child in his care; when finally he had succeeded in placing the little girl where he would be satisfied to leave her, he himself was suddenly and peremptorily called east to take a post in Rupert’s Land.  He could not disobey and remain in the Company, and the Company was more to him than life or revenue.  The little girl he left in Sacre Coeur of Quebec; he himself took up his residence in the Hudson Bay country.  After a few years, becoming lonely for his own flesh and blood, he sent for his daughter.  There, as Factor, he gained a vast power, and this power he turned into the channels of his hatred.  Graehme Stewart felt always against him the hand of influence.  His posts in the Company’s service became intolerable.  At length, in indignation against continued injustice, oppression, and insult, he resigned, broken in fortune and in prospects.  He became one of the earliest Free Traders on the Saskatchewan, devoting his energies to enraged opposition of the Company which had wronged him.  In the space of three short years he had met a violent and striking death; for the early days of the Free Trader were adventurous.  Galen Albret’s revenge had struck home.

Then in after years the Factor had again met with Andrew Levoy.  The man staggered into Conjuror’s House late at night, He had started from Winnipeg to descend the Albany River, but had met with mishap and starvation.  One by one his dogs had died.  In some blind fashion he pushed on for days after his strength and sanity had left him.  Mu-hi-kun had brought him in.  His toes and fingers had frozen and dropped off; his face was a mask of black frost-bitten flesh, in which deep fissures opened to the raw.  He had gone snow-blind.  Scarcely was he recognizable as a human being.

From such a man in extremity could come nothing but the truth, so Galen Albret believed him.  Before Andrew Levoy died that night he told of his deceit.  The Factor left the room with the weight of a crime on his conscience.  For Graehme Stewart had been innocent of any wrong toward him or his bride.

Such was the story Galen Albret saw in the little silver match-box.  That was the one flaw in his consciousness of righteousness; the one instance in a long career when his ruthless acts of punishment or reprisal had not rested on rigid justice, and by the irony of fate the one instance had touched him very near.  Now here before him was his enemy’s son—­he wondered that he had not discovered the resemblance before—­and he was about to visit on him the severest punishment in his power.  Was not this an opportunity vouchsafed him to repair his ancient fault, to cleanse his conscience of the one sin of the kind it would acknowledge?