“You have never failed me, never, never,” she whispered.  “You are not failing me now.”  And then I heard Starling’s voice at the door calling my name.

I opened to him mechanically, and accepted his pleasant phrases with a face like wood, though my manner was apt enough, I think.  I had no feeling as regarded him; all my thought was with the woman by the table.

He went to her with his news, but she interrupted him.  “I know.”  Her face was as expressionless as my own.  “I am going with you,” she said to him.  “When do we leave?”

“In a few minutes.”  He looked from one to the other of us, and if he could not probe the situation it was perhaps no wonder.  We had forgotten him, and we sat like dead people.  For once his tremendous, compelling presence was ignored, yet my tongue replied to him courteously, and I could not but admit the perfection of his attitude.  He deplored the necessity that took his cousin from me; he, and all of his people, labored under great indebtedness to me.  He was dignified, direct of thought and speech.  The man whom I had seen by the dead ashes of the camp fire; the man who had held my wife’s miniature, and taunted me with what it meant,—­that man was gone.  This was an elder brother, a grave elder brother, chastened by suffering.

The woman closed the scene.  “I am prepared to go with you,” she told him.  “I shall wait here till the canoes are ready.  Will you leave me with my husband?”

She had never before said “husband” in my hearing.  As soon as the door clicked behind Starling I went to her.  I knelt and laid my cheek on her hand.

“You are going to stay with me, Mary.  You are my wife.  You cannot escape that.  It is fundamental.  Patriotism is a man-made feeling.  You are going to stay with me.  I am going now to tell Cadillac.”

But I could feel her tremble.  “If you say more, I must leave you.  You cannot alter my mind.  What has come must come.  Can we not sit together in silence till I go?”

And so I sat beside her.  “You are a strange woman,” I said at length.

She looked at me as if to plead her own cause.  “Strange events have made me.  I cannot marvel if you are bitter, for I have brought you unhappiness.  Yet it was in this room that I asked you to remember that I went with you against my will.”

“I remember.”

“And will you remember what—­what I have seen?  Is it strange that I understand; that I know we must part?”

I shook my head.  “It is your cousin’s mind impressed on yours that tells you that we must part,—­that and your unfathomable spirit,—­the spirit that carried you in man’s dress through those weeks as a captive.  It is that same spirit that will bring you back to me some day.”

“Monsieur!”

“That will bring you back.”

“Monsieur, no.  I cannot change myself.”

“Would I have you change?  Mary, Mary!  I took you as a boy with me to the wilderness because you had an unbreakable will and a fanatic’s courage.  Yet this is not the end.  It is not the end.”