Vividly he saw again the dark, haunting eyes of the woman in the coach, and heard again the few low, tense words with which she had revealed to him her quest of a man—­a man by the name of Michael O’Doone.  In her presence he had felt the nearness of tragedy.  It had stirred him deeply, almost as deeply as the picture she had left in her seat—­the picture hidden now against his breast—­like a thing which must not be betrayed, and which a strange and compelling instinct had made him associate in such a startling way with Tavish.  He could not get Tavish out of his mind; Tavish, the haunted man; Tavish the man who had fled from the Firepan Creek country at just about the time the girl in the picture had stood on the rock beside the pool; Tavish, terror-driven by a spirit of the dead!  He did not attempt to reason the matter, or bare the folly of his alarm.  He did not ask himself about the improbability of it all, but accepted without equivocation that strong impression as it had come to him—­the conviction that the girl on the rock and the woman in the coach were in some way identified with the flight of Tavish, the man he had never seen, from that far valley in the northwest mountains.

The questions he asked himself now were not to establish in his own mind either the truth or the absurdity of this conviction.  He was determining with himself whether or not to confide in Father Roland.  It was more than delicacy that made him hesitate; it was almost a personal shame.  For a long time he had kept within his breast the secret of his own tragedy and dishonour.  That it was his dishonour, almost as much as the woman’s, had been his own conviction; and how, at last, he had come to reveal that corroding sickness in his soul to a man who was almost a stranger was more than he could understand.  But he had done just that.  Father Roland had seen him stripped down to the naked truth in an hour of great need, and he had put out a hand in time to save him.  He no longer doubted this last immeasurable fact.  Twenty times since then, coldly and critically, he had thought of the woman who had been his wife, and slowly and terribly the enormity of her crime had swept further and further away from him the anguish of her loss.  He was like a man risen from a sick bed, breathing freely again, tasting once more the flavour of the air that filled his lungs.  All this he owed to Father Roland, and because of this—­and his confession of only two nights ago—­he felt a burning humiliation at the thought of telling the Missioner that another face had come to fill his thoughts, and stir his anxieties.  And what less could he tell, if he confided in him at all?