physically—­not a day passed that Father Roland did not point out some fresh triumph for him there.  His limbs were nearly as tireless as the Missioner’s; he knew that he was growing heavier; and he could at last chop through a tree without winding himself.  These things his companions could see.  His appetite was voracious.  His eyes were keen and his hands steady, so that he was doing splendid practice shooting with both rifle and pistol, and each day when the Missioner insisted on their bout with the gloves he found it more and more difficult to hold himself in.  “Not so hard, David,” Father Roland frequently cautioned him, and in place of the first joyous grin there was always a look of settled anxiety in Mukoki’s face as he watched them.  The more David pummelled him, the greater was the Little Missioner’s triumph.  “I told you what this north country could do for you,” was his exultant slogan; “I told you!”

Once David was on the point of telling him that he could see only the tenth part of what it had done for him, but the old shame held his tongue.  He did not want to bring up the old story.  The fact that it had existed, and had written itself out in human passion, remained with him still as a personal and humiliating degradation.  It was like a scar on his own body, a repulsive sore which he wished to keep out of sight, even from the eyes of the man who had been his salvation.  The growth of this revulsion within him had kept pace with his physical improvement, and if at the end of these ten days Father Roland had spoken of the woman who had betrayed him—­the woman who had been his wife—­he would have turned the key on that subject as decisively as the Missioner had banned further conversation or conjecture about Tavish.  This was, perhaps, the best evidence that he had cut out the cancer in his breast.  The Golden Goddess, whom he had thought an angel, he now saw stripped of her glory.  If she had repented in that room, if she had betrayed fear even, a single emotion of mental agony, he would not have felt so sure of himself.  But she had laughed.  She was, like Tavish, a devil.  He thought of her beauty now as that of a poisonous flower.  He had unwittingly touched such a flower once, a flower of wonderful waxen loveliness, and it had produced a pustular eruption on his hand.  She was like that.  Poisonous.  Treacherous.  A creature with as little soul as that flower had perfume.  It was this change in him, in his conception and his memory of her, that he would have given much to have Father Roland understand.

During this period of his own transformation he had observed a curious change in Father Roland.  At times, after leaving Tavish’s cabin, the Little Missioner seemed struggling under the weight of a deep and gloomy oppression.  Once or twice, in the firelight, it had looked almost like sickness, and David had seen his face grow wan and old.  Always after these fits of dejection there would follow a reaction, and for hours the Missioner would be like