He was filled with a great desire to go at once to the Girl and tell her this wonderful new fact that had come into her life, and he found himself suddenly at the door of his room, with his fingers on the latch.  Standing there, he shrugged his shoulders, laughing softly at himself as he realized how absurdly sensational he was becoming all at once.  To-morrow would be time.  He filled and lighted his pipe, and in the whitish fumes of his tobacco he could picture quite easily the gray, dead face of Tavish, hanging at the end of his meat rack.  Pacing restlessly back and forth across his room, he recalled the scenes of that night, and of days and nights that had followed.  Brokaw had given him the key that was unlocking door after door.  “Guess he was a little crazy,” Brokaw had said, speaking of Tavish as he had last known him on the Firepan.  Crazy!  Going mad!  And at last he had killed himself.  Was it possible that a man of Tavish’s sort could be haunted for so long by spectres of the past?  It seemed unreasonable.  He thought of Father Roland and of the mysterious room in the Chateau, where he worshipped at the shrine of a woman and a child who were gone.

He clenched his hands, and stopped himself.  What had leapt into his mind was as startling to his inner consciousness as the unexpected flash of magnesium in a dark room.  It was unthinkable—­impossible; and yet, following it, he found himself face to face with question after question which he made no effort to answer.  He was dazed for a moment as if by the terrific impact of a thing which had neither weight nor form.  Tavish, the woman, the girl—­Father Roland!  Absurd.  He shook himself, literally shook himself, to get rid of that wildly impossible idea.  He drove his mind back to the photograph of the girl—­and the woman.  How had she come into possession of the picture which Brokaw had taken?  What had Nisikoos tried to say to Marge O’Doone in those last moments when she was dying—­whispered words which the girl had not heard because she was crying, and her heart was breaking?  Did Nisikoos know that the mother was alive?  Had she sent the picture to her when she realized that the end of her own time was drawing near?  There was something unreasonable in this too, but it was the only solution that came to him.

He was still pacing his room when the creaking of the door stopped him.  It was opening slowly and steadily and apparently with extreme caution.  In another moment Marge O’Doone stood inside.  He had not seen her face so white before.  Her eyes were big and glowing darkly—­pools of quivering fear, of wild and imploring supplication.  She ran to him, and clung to him with her hands at his shoulders, her face close to his.

“Sakewawin—­dear Sakewawin—­we must go; we must hurry—­to-night!”

She was trembling, fairly shivering against him, with one hand touching his face now, and he put his arms about her gently.