And then, fiercely, Nada struck up the Missioner’s comforting hand, and Peter saw her young face white as star-dust in the lampglow.

“I don’t care what God thinks,” she cried passionately.  “God didn’t do right today.  Mister Roger told me everything, that he was an outlaw, an’ I oughtn’t to marry him.  But I didn’t care.  I loved him.  I could hide with him.  An’ we were coming to have you marry us tonight when God let Jed Hawkins drag me away, to sell me to a man over on the railroad—­an’ it was God who let Mister Roger go back and kill him.  I tell you He didn’t do right!  He didn’t—­he didn’t—­because Mister Roger brought me the first happiness I ever knew, an’ I loved him, an’ he loved me—­an’ God was wicked to let him kill Jed Hawkins—­”

Her voice cried out, a woman’s soul broken in a girl’s body, and Peter whimpered and watched the Missioner as he raised Nada to her feet and went with her into his bedroom, where a few minutes before he had lighted a lamp.  And Peter crept in quietly after them, and when the Missioner had gone and closed the door, leaving them alone in their tragedy, Nada seemed to see him for the first time and slowly she reached out her arms.

“Peter!” she whispered.  “Peter—­Peter—­”

In the minutes that followed, Peter could feel her heart beating.  Clutched against her breast he looked up at the white, beautiful face, the trembling throat, the wide-open blue eyes staring at the one black window between them and the outside night.  A lull had come in the storm.  It was quiet and ominous stillness, and the ticking of a clock, old and gray like the Missioner himself, filled the room.  And Nada, seated on the edge of Father John’s bed, no longer looked like the young girl of “seventeen goin’ on eighteen.”  That afternoon, in the hidden jackpine open, with its sweet-scented jasmines, its violets and its crimson strawberries under their feet, the soul of a woman had taken possession of her body.  In that hour the first happiness of her life had come to her.  She had heard Jolly Roger McKay tell her those things which she already knew—­that he was an outlaw, and that he was hiding down on the near-edge of civilization because the Royal Mounted were after him farther north—­and that he was not fit to love her, and that it was a crime to let her love him.  It was then the soul of the woman had come to her in all its triumph.  She had made her choice, definitely and decisively, without hesitation and without fear.  And now, as she stared unseeingly at the window against which the rain was beating, the woman in her girlish body rose in her mightier than in the hour of her happiness, fighting to find a way—­crying out for the man she loved.