There was a moment of silence.  And then, “I don’t want you to fight Bateese,” she said.

The needles were working swiftly when he turned toward her again, and a second time the long lashes shadowed what a moment before he might have seen in her eyes.

XIII

The morning passed like a dream to Carrigan.  He permitted himself to live and breathe it as one who finds himself for a space in the heart of a golden mirage.  He was sitting so near Marie-Anne that now and then the faint perfume of her came to him like the delicate scent of a flower.  It was a breath of crushed violets, sweet as the air he was breathing, violets gathered in the deep cool of the forest, a whisper of sweetness about her, as if on her bosom she wore always the living flowers.  He fancied her gathering them last bloom-time, a year ago, alone, her feet seeking out the damp mosses, her little fingers plucking the smiling and laughing faces of the violet flowers to be treasured away in fragrant sachets, as gentle as the wood-thrush’s note, compared with the bottled aromas fifteen hundred miles south.  It seemed to be a physical part of her, a thing born of the glow in her cheeks, a living exhalation of her soft red lips—­and yet only when he was near, very near, did the life of it reach him.

She did not know he was thinking these things.  There was nothing in his voice, he thought, to betray him.  He was sure she was unconscious of the fight he was making.  Her eyes smiled and laughed with him, she counted her stitches, her fingers worked, and she talked to him as she might have talked to a friend of St. Pierre’s.  She told him how St. Pierre had made the barge, the largest that had ever been on the river, and that he had built it entirely of dry cedar, so that it floated like a feather wherever there was water enough to run a York boat.  She told him how St. Pierre had brought the piano down from Edmonton, and how he had saved it from pitching in the river by carrying the full weight of it on his shoulders when they met with an accident in running through a dangerous rapids bringing it down.  St. Pierre was a very strong man, she said, a note of pride in her voice.  And then she added,

“Sometimes, when he picks me up in his arms, I feel that he is going to squeeze the life out of me!”

Her words were like a sharp thrust into his heart.  For an instant they painted a vision for him, a picture of that slim and adorable creature crushed close in the great arms of St. Pierre, so close that she could not breathe.  In that mad moment of his hurt it was almost a living, breathing reality for him there on the golden fore-deck of the scow.  He turned his face toward the far shore, where the wilderness seemed to reach off into eternity.  What a glory it was—­the green seas of spruce and cedar and balsam, the ridges of poplar and birch rising like silvery spume above the darker billows, and afar