“Go, by all means.  I will take care of Mr. Selincourt and write my letter at the same time,” Jervis answered, taking a fountain pen and a notebook from his pocket, and beginning to write forthwith.

Mary walked out of the house and down to the river just as she was, for the sun had gone down sufficiently to render a hat unnecessary.  The two men were busy with their boat still, but one of them left his work and put Mary across the river in one of the other boats which lay drawn up on the bank.

The Indians, who had been crowding the store half an hour before, were encamped on the bank now, a little lower down, and were busy cooking fish for their supper.  There were no other customers visible either inside the store or out.  Now that the fishing was in full swing the fishermen had little time for lounging about the store; so, although the work of delivering goods was greater, there were compensating circumstances in not having the store always crowded up with men and lads, who had come more for the sake of talking than buying.

Mary walked up the steep bank and across the open space to the store door with a sense of the strangest unreality all about her.  It was herself who walked and moved, yet all the time she seemed to stand aside and let another self think and feel and act.  A composite odour of groceries, bacon, tobacco, and cheap clothes met her as she entered the rough, homely shed, which was a typical emporium of the backwoods; but she had no time to analyse the odours, being at once attracted by Katherine, who stood at a tall desk by the window, entering items in a ledger.  At the same time Katherine glanced up and saw the visitor entering the door.  She flushed at the sight, and became suddenly nervous, acutely conscious, too, of her poor, shabby clothes, old-fashioned and ill cut, as contrasted with the picturesque house gown in which Mary was garbed, a soft grey woollen, which, though simple enough to have been worn upon any occasion, yet suggested London or Paris in every line.

“You are Miss Radford, I think,” said Mary in that quiet, cultured voice which somehow matched, or at least harmonized, with her gown, “and I have come to say ‘Thank you’ for your goodness to my dear father.”

“Oh, but really it was not I who saved him, but Phil!  I should have been too heavy to walk three steps across that muskeg without sticking fast,” Katherine answered, with a low, nervous laugh.

But Mary was not to be put off in this fashion, and she went on, her voice fluttering a little because of the emotion she was keeping down with a resolute hand:  “I know it was your brother who went out on the swamp and put the rope round my father, but I also know that it was really you who planned the rescue and pulled my father out.  I cannot speak of it all as I would wish, and words are too faint and poor to express all I feel; but from my heart I am grateful, and all my life I shall be in your debt.”