She looked straight at me.  “And until then, good fortune.”

But I paused.  “Wish me opportunity.  That is all that I ask from you or of you,—­opportunity.  Good-by for a week, madame.”

CHAPTER XVIII

IN WHICH I USE OPPORTUNITY

I squatted beside many camp fires in the next week.  I sat in the flattened cones of the Chippewas’ tepees and smoked innumerable pipes of rank tobacco with the old men.  I traded some, but talked more, and at the end of the week I started home.  I waited for a pleasant day and a westerly wind, for the small canoe was perilously laden with skins.  There was scarcely room for Labarthe and myself to crowd down on our knees and use our paddles.

We slipped into Sturgeon Cove late in the afternoon, and swept with the wind up the stretches of the bay to the camping ground.  Summer was at flood tide, and the air was pungent and the leaves shining.  The sunset shone through tattered ends of cloud, so that the west was hung with crimson banners.  It was my first homecoming.

Before we reached the camp I saw the woman.  She had strayed down the shore to the west,—­too far for safety, I thought,—­and was standing alone on the sand, looking toward the sunset.  Her head was back, and her arms flung out to the woods and the shining sky.  I have sometimes found myself stretching my own arms in just that fashion when I have been alone and have felt something pressing within me that was too large for speech.  I motioned Labarthe to ship his paddle that I might look.  The western glow was full upon the woman, and her lips were parted.  The open sleeves of her skin blouse fell away from her arms, which had grown gently rounded since I saw her first.  I could not see her eyes, but she looked somewhere off into the untraveled west,—­the west that was the portal of my enterprise.  What was her thought?  I must not let myself trap it unaware.  I gave a long, low call; the call of the loon as he skirts the marshes in the twilight.

She turned instantly and saw us.  I bent forward.  The drabbled plume of my hat swept the water, and I heard Labarthe curse under his breath, and beg me remember that the canoe was laden.  But just then I had no caution in me.

The woman’s arms dropped.  She had a moment of indecision, and she stood looking at me with the sunset in her face and eyes.  Then she suddenly thrust out both hands towards me across the stretch of water.  I could see her smooth-skinned brown fingers, and one wore my ring.  She bade me welcome.  I bent to my paddle, and would have crashed the canoe up to the shore.

But she forestalled me.  She was already on her way back to the camp, and if she knew that I had started toward her she did not let me see.  So I had, perforce, to follow.  She walked with the free, gliding step of a woman whose foot had been trained on polished surfaces.  I watched her, and let Labarthe paddle our way through the reeds.