done!  He wanted to hurl the yellow trinket, shaped so sacrilegiously in the image of a heart, as far as he could fling it into the forest.  It seemed to burn his fingers, and he held for it a personal hatred.  But it was for Marie!  Marie would prize it, and Marie would purify it.  Against her breast, where beat a heart of his beloved Northland, it would cease to be a polluted thing.  This was his thought as he replaced it in the casket and retraced his steps to the fox pens.

Thoreau was tossing fish into the last pen when Father Roland came up.  David was not with him.  In answer to the Missioner’s inquiry he nodded toward the thicker growth of the forest where as yet his axe had not scarred the trees.

“He said that he would walk a little distance into the timber.”

Father Roland muttered something that Thoreau did not catch, and then, a sudden brightness lighting up his eyes: 

“I am going to leave you to-day.”

“To-day, mon Pere!” Thoreau made a muffled exclamation of astonishment.  “To-day?  And it is fairly well along toward noon!”

“He cannot travel far.”  The Missioner nodded in the direction of the unthinned timber.  “It will give us four hours, between noon and dark.  He is soft.  You understand?  We will make as far as the old trapping shack you abandoned two winters ago over on Moose Creek.  It is only eight miles, but it will be a bit of hardening for him.  And, besides....”

He was silent for a moment, as if turning a matter over again in his own mind.

“I want to get him away.”

He turned a searching, quietly analytic gaze upon Thoreau to see whether the Frenchman would understand without further explanation.

The fox breeder picked up the empty gunny sack.

“We will begin to pack the sledge, mon Pere.  There must be a good hundred pounds to the dog.”

As they turned back to the cabin Father Roland cast a look over his shoulder to see whether David was returning.

Three or four hundred yards in the forest David stood in a mute and increasing wonder.  He was in a tiny open, and about him the spruce and balsam hung still as death under their heavy cloaks of freshly fallen snow.  It was as if he had entered unexpectedly into a wonderland of amazing beauty, and that from its dark and hidden bowers, crusted with their glittering mantles of white, snow naiads must be peeping forth at him, holding their breath for fear of betraying themselves to his eyes.  There was not the chirp of a bird nor the flutter of a wing—­not the breath of a sound to disturb the wonderful silence.  He was encompassed in a white, soft world that seemed tremendously unreal—­that for some strange reason made him breathe very softly, that made him stand without a movement, and made him listen, as though he had come to the edge of the universe and that there were mysterious things to hear, and possibly to see, if he remained very quiet.  It was the