A dozen feet away, full in the moonlight, three figures sat on the edge of the cliff, as motionless as though hewn out of rock.  Instinctively Philip’s hand slipped to his revolver holster, but he drew it back when he saw that one of the three figures was that of a woman.  Beside her crouched a huge wolf-dog; on the other side of the dog sat a man.  The man was resting in the attitude of an Indian, with his elbows on his knees, his chin in the palms of his hands, gazing steadily and silently out over the Bay toward Churchill.

It was his companion that held Philip motionless against the face of the rock.  She, too, was leaning forward, gazing in that same steady, silent way toward Churchill.  She was bareheaded.  Her hair fell loose over her shoulders and streamed down her back until it piled itself upon the rock, shining dark and lustrous in the light of the moon.  Philip knew that she was not an Indian.

Suddenly the girl sat erect, and then sprang to her feet, partly facing him, the breeze rippling her hair about her face and shoulders, her eyes turned to the vast gray depths of the world beyond the forests.  For an instant she turned so that the light of the moon fell full upon her, and in that moment Philip thought that her eyes had searched him out in the shadow of the rock and were looking straight into his own.  Never had he seen such a beautiful face among the forest people.  He had dreamed of such faces beside camp-fires, in the deep loneliness of long nights in the forests, when he had awakened to bring before him visions of what Eileen Brokaw might have been to him if he had found her one of these people.  He drew himself closer to the rock.  The girl turned again to the edge of the cliff, her slender form silhouetted against the starlit sky.  She leaned over the dog, and he heard her voice, soft and caressing, but he could not understand her words.  The man lifted his head, and he recognized the swarthy, clear-cut features of a French half-breed.  He moved away as quietly as he had come.

The girl’s voice stopped him.

“And that is Churchill, Pierre—­the Churchill you have told me of, where the ships come in?”

“Yes, that is Churchill, Jeanne.”

For a moment there was silence.  Then, clear and low, with a wild, sobbing note in her voice that thrilled Philip, the girl cried: 

“And I hate it, Pierre.  I hate it—­hate it—­hate it!”

Philip stepped out boldly from the rock.

“And I hate it, too,” he said.

VI

Scarce had he spoken when he would have given much to have recalled his words, wrung from his lips by that sobbing note of loneliness, of defiance, of half pain in the girl’s voice.  It was the same note, the same spirit crying out against his world that he had listened to in the moaning of the surf as it labored to carry away the dead, and in the wind that sighed in the spruce-tops below the mountain, only now it was the spirit speaking through a human voice.  Every fiber in his body vibrated in response to it, and he stood with bared head, filled with a wild desire to make these people understand, and yet startled at the effect which his appearance had produced.