O'Shea stopped a few paces from the nearest figure, and Caius stopped a few paces nearer the opening of the dune.

"Ye see these men?" said O'Shea.

Caius did not answer.

O'Shea raised his voice:

"I say before them what I have said, that if ye'll swear here before heaven, as a man of honour, that ye'll walk from here to the loighthouse on The Cloud—which ye shall find in the straight loine of the beach—without once turning yer head or looking behoind ye, neither man nor beast nor devil shall do ye any hurt, and yer properties shall be returned to ye when a cart can be got to take them. Will ye swear?"

Caius made no answer. He was looking intently. As soon as the tones of O'Shea's voice were carried away by the bluster of the wind, as far as the human beings there were concerned there was perfect stillness; the surf and the wind might have been sweeping the dunes alone.

"And if I will not swear?" asked Caius, in a voice that was loud enough to reach to the last man in the long single rank.

O'Shea stepped nearer him, and, as if in pretence of wiping his face with his gloved hand, he sent him a hissing whisper that gave a sudden change of friendliness and confidence to his voice, "Don't be a fool! swear it."

"Are these men, or are they corpses?" asked Caius.

The stillness of the forms before him became an almost unendurable spectacle.

He had no sooner spoken than O'Shea appealed to the men, shouting words in the queer guttural French. And Caius saw the first man slowly raise his hand as if in an attitude of oath-taking, and the second man did likewise. O'Shea turned round and faced him, speaking hastily. The shadow of the cloud was sending dark shudderings of lighter and darker shades across the sand hollow, and these seemed almost like a visible body of the wind that with searching blast drifted loose sand upon them all. With the sweep of the shadow and the wind, Caius saw the movement of the lifted hand go down the line.

"I lay my loife upon it," said O'Shea, "that if ye'll say on yer honour as a man, and as a gintleman, that ye'll not look behoind ye, ye shall go scot-free. It's a simple thing enough; what harm's there in it?"

The boy had come near behind Caius. He said one soft word, "Promise!" or else Caius imagined he said it. Caius knew at least what the boy wished him to do.

The pony moved nearer, shivering with cold, and Caius realized that the condition of wet and cold in which they were need not be prolonged.

"I promise," he shouted angrily, "and I'll keep the promise, whatever infernal reason there may be for it; but if I'm attacked from behind——" He added threats loud and violent, for he was very angry.

Before he had finished speaking—the thought might have been brought by some movement in the shadow of the cloud, and by the sound of the wind, or by his heated brain—but the thought came to him that O'Shea, under his big fur-coat, had indulged in strange, harsh laughter.

Caius cared nothing. He had made his decision; he had given his word; he had no thought now but to take what of his traps he could carry and be gone on his journey.



CHAPTER VI.

THE SEA-MAID.

Caius understood that he had still three miles of the level beach to tread. At first he hardly felt the sand under his feet, they were so dead with cold. The spray from the roaring tide struck his face sideways. He had time now to watch each variation, each in and out of the dune, and he looked at them eagerly, as the only change that was afforded to the monotony. Then for the first time he learned how completely a man is shut out from all one half of the world by the simple command not to look behind him, and all the unseen half of his world became rife, in his thought, with mysterious creatures and their works. At first he felt that he was courting certain death by keeping the word he had given; in the clap of the waves he seemed to hear the pistol-shot that was to be his doom, or the knife-like breath of the wind seemed the dagger in the hand of a following murderer. But as he went on and no evil fate befell, his fear died, and only curiosity remained—a curiosity so lively that it fixed eagerly upon the stretch of the surf behind him, upon his own footsteps left on the soft sand, upon the sand-hills that he had passed, although they were almost the same as the sand-hills that were before. It would have been a positive joy to him to turn and look at any of these things. While his mind dwelt upon it, he almost grudged each advancing step, because it put more of the interesting world into the region from which he was shut out as wholly as if a wall of separation sprang up between the behind and before.

By an effort of will he turned his thought from this desire, or from considering what the mysterious something could be that it was all-important for him not to see, or who it was that in this desolate place would spy upon him if he broke his vow.

When his activity had set the blood again coursing warmly in his veins, all that was paltry and depressing passed from his mind and heart, as a mist is rolled away by the wind. The sweet, wild air, that in those regions is an elixir of life to the stranger, making him young if he be old, and if he be young making him feel as demigods felt in days of yore, for a day and a night had been doing its work upon him. Mere life and motion became to him a delight such as he had never felt before; and when the moon came out again from the other side of the cloud, the sight of her beams upon surf and sand was like a rare wild joy. He was glad that no one interfered with his pleasure, that he was, as far as he knew, alone with the clouds that were winging their way among moonbeams in the violet sky, and with the waves and the wind with which he held companionship.

He had gone a mile, it might be more; he heard a step behind him. In vain he tried to convince himself that some noise natural to the lonely beach deceived him. In the high tide of life that the bracing air had brought him, his senses were acute and true. He knew that he heard this step: it was light, like a child's; it was nimble, like a fawn's; sometimes it was very near him. He was not in the least afraid; but do what he would, his mind could form no idea of what creature it might be who thus attended him. No dark or fearful picture crossed his mind just then; all its images were good.

The fleet of white clouds that were sailing in the sky rang glad changes upon the beauty of the moonlit scene. Half a mile or more Caius walked listening to the footstep; then he came on a wrecked boat buried in the sand, its rim laid bare by the tide. Caius struck his foot and fell upon it.

Striking his head, stunned for a moment, then springing up again, in the motion of falling or rising, he knew not how, he saw the beach behind him—the waves that were now nearing the foot of the dune, the track between with his footsteps upon it, and, standing in this track, alert to fly if need be, the figure of a girl. Her dress was all blown by the wind, her curling hair was like a twining garland round her face, and her face—ah! that face: he knew it as well as, far better than he knew his own; its oval curves, its dimpled sweetness, its laughing eyes. Just for such brief seconds of time as were necessary for perfect recognition he saw it; and then, impelled by his former purpose—no time now for a new volition—he got himself up and walked on, with his eyes in front as before.

He thought the sea-maid did not know that he had seen her, for her footsteps came on after his own. Or, if she knew, she trusted him not to turn. That was well; she might trust him. Never in his life had Caius felt less temptation to do the thing that he held to be false. He knew now, for he had seen the whole line of the beach, that there was nothing there for him to fear, nothing that could give any adequate reason to any man to compel him to walk as he now walked. That did not matter; he had given his word. In the physical exaltation of the hour the best of him was uppermost. Like the angels, who walk in heavenly paths, he had no desire to be a thing that could stoop from moral rectitude. The knowledge that his old love of the sea was his companion only enhanced the strength of his vow, only made all that the strength of vows mean more dear to him; and the moonlit shore was more beautiful, and life, each moment that he was then living, more absolutely good.

So they went on, and he did not try to think where the sea-maid had come from, or whether the gray flapping dress and the girlish step were but the phantom guise that she could don for the hour, or whether, if he should turn and pursue her, she would drop from her upright height into the scaly folds that he had once seen, and plunge into the waves, or whether that had been the masquerade, and she a true woman of the land. He did not know or care. Come what come might, his spirit walked the beach that night with the beautiful spirit that the face of the sea-maid interpreted to him.



CHAPTER VII.

THE GRAVE LADY.

The hills of Cloud Island were a fair sight to see in the moonlight. When the traveller came close to them, the beach ended obviously in a sandy road which led up on the island. There was a small white wooden house near the beach; there was candlelight within, but Caius took no notice of it. The next building was a lighthouse, which stood three hundred yards farther on. The light looking seaward was not visible. He passed the distance swiftly, and no sooner were his feet level with the wall of the square wooden tower, than he turned about on the soft sandy road and faced the wind that had been racing with him, and looked. The scene was all as he might have expected to see it; but there was no living creature in sight. He stood in the gale, bare-headed, looking, looking; he had no desire to enter the house. The sea-maid was not in sight, truly; but as long as he stood alone in the moonlight scene, he felt that her presence was with him. Then he remembered the dying man of whom he had been told, who lay in such need of his ministrations. The thought came with no binding sense of duty such as he had felt concerning the keeping of his vow. He would have scorned to do a dishonourable thing in the face of the uplifting charm of the nature around him, and, more especially, in the presence of his love; but what had nature and this, her beautiful child, to do with the tending of disease and death? Better let the man die; better remain himself in the wholesome outside. He felt that he would put himself at variance with the companions of the last glorious hour if he attended to the dictates of this dolorous duty. Yet, because of a dull habit of duty he had, he turned in a minute, and went into the house where he had been told he would receive guidance for the rest of his journey.

He had no sooner knocked at the substantial door on the ground-floor of the lighthouse than it was opened by a sallow-faced, kindly-looking old woman. She admitted him, as if he were an expected comer, into a large square room, in which a lamp and a fire were burning. The room was exquisitely neat and clean, as if the inspector of lighthouses might be looked for at any moment. The woman, who was French, spoke a little English, and her French was of a sort which Caius could understand and answer. She placed a chair for him by the heated stove, asked where Mr. O'Shea and the cart had tarried, listened with great interest to a brief account of the accident in the quicksand, and, without more delay, poured out hot strong coffee, which Caius drank out of a large bowl.

"Are you alone in the house?" asked Caius. The impression was strong upon him that he was in a place where the people bore a dangerous or mysterious character. A woman to be alone, with open doors, must either be in league with those from whom danger might be feared, or must possess mysterious powers of self-defence.

The woman assured him that she was alone, and perfectly safe. She gave a kindly and careful glance at the traveller's boots, which had been wet, and brought him another pair. It was evident she knew who Caius was, and wherefore he had come to the island, and that her careful entertainment of him was prearranged. It was arranged, too, that she should pass him on to the patient for whom his skill was chiefly desired that night as quickly as possible. She gave him only reasonable time to be warmed and fed, telling him the while what a good man this was who had lately been taken so very ill, what an excellent husband and father, how important his life was to the welfare of the community.

"For," said she, "he is truly rather rich and very intelligent; so much so that some would even say that he was the friend of Madame Le Maitre." Her voice had a crescendo of vehemence up to this last name.

Caius had his marching orders once more. His hostess went out with him to the moonlit road to point his way. She showed him where the road divided, and which path to take, and said that he must then pass three houses and enter the fourth. She begged him, with courteous authority, to hasten.

The houses were a good way apart. After half an hour's fast walking, Caius came to the appointed place. The house was large, of light-coloured wood, shingled all over roof and sides, and the light and shades in the lapping of the shingles gave the soft effect almost as of feathers in the lesser light of night. It stood in a large compound of undulating grassy ground.

The whole lower floor of this house was one room. In the middle of it, on a small pallet bedstead, lay the sick man. Beside him was a woman dressed in gray homespun, apparently his wife, and another woman who wore a dress not unlike that of a nun, a white cap being bandaged closely round her forehead, cheeks and chin. The nun-like dress gave her great dignity. She seemed to Caius a strong-featured woman of large stature, apparently in early middle age. He was a good deal surprised when he found that this was Madame Le Maitre. He had had no definite notion of her, but this certainly did not fulfil his idea.

It was but the work of a short time to do all that could be done that night for the sick man, to leave the remedies that were to be used. It was now midnight. The hot stove in the room, causing reaction from the strongly-stimulating air, made him again feel heavy with sleep. The nun-like lady, who had as yet said almost nothing to him, now touched him on the shoulder and beckoned him to follow her. She led him out into the night again, round the house and into a barn, in either side of which were tremendous bins of hay.

"Your house," she said, "is a long way from here, and you are very tired. In the house here there is the infection." Here she pointed him to the hay, and, giving him a warm blanket, bade him good-night.

Caius shut the door, and found that the place was lit by dusky rays of moonlight that came through chinks in its walls. He climbed the ladder that reached to the top of the hay, and rolled himself and his blanket warmly in it. The barn was not cold. The airiness of the walls was a relief to him after the infected room. Never had couch felt more luxurious.



CHAPTER VIII.

HOW THEY LIVED ON THE CLOUD.

When the chinks of moonlight had been replaced by brighter chinks of sunlight, the new doctor who had come so gallantly to the aid of the sufferers on Cloud Island opened his eyes upon his first day there.

He heard some slight sounds, and looked over the edge of his bed to see a little table set forth in the broad passage between the two stores of hay. A slip of a girl, of about fourteen years of age, was arranging dishes upon it. When Caius scrambled down, she informed him, with childish timidity of mien, that Madame Le Maitre had said that he was to have his breakfast there before he went in to see "father." The child spoke French, but Caius spoke English because it relieved his mind to do so.

"Upon my word!" he said, "Madame Le Maitre keeps everything running in very good order, and takes prodigious care of us all."

"Oh, oui, monsieur," replied the child sagely, judging from his look of amusement and the name he had repeated that this was the proper answer.

The breakfast, which was already there, consisted of fish, delicately baked, and coffee. The young doctor felt exceedingly odd, sitting in the cart-track of a barn and devouring these viands from a breakfast-table that was tolerably well set out with the usual number of dishes and condiments. The big double door was closed to keep out the cold wind, but plenty of air and numerous sunbeams managed to come in. The sunbeams were golden bars of dust, crossing and interlacing in the twilight of the windowless walls. The slip of a girl in her short frock remained, perhaps from curiosity, perhaps because she had been bidden to do so, but she made herself as little obvious as possible, standing up against one corner near the door and shyly twisting some bits of hay in her hands. Caius, who was enjoying himself, discovered a new source of amusement in pretending to forget her presence and then looking at her quickly, for he always found the glance of her big gray eyes was being withdrawn from his own face, and child-like confusion ensued.

When he had eaten enough, he set to his proper work with haste and diligence. He made the girl tell him how many children there were, and find them all for him, so that in a trice he had them standing in a row in the sunlight outside the barn, with their little tongues all out, that the state of their health might be properly inspected. Then he went in to his patient of the night before.

The disease was diphtheria. It was a severe case; but the man had been healthy, and Caius approved the arrangements that Madame Le Maitre had made to give him plenty of air and nourishment.

The wife was alone with her husband this morning, and when Caius had done all that was necessary, and given her directions for the proper protection of herself and the children, she told him that her eldest girl would go with him to the house of Madame Le Maitre. That lady, said she simply, would tell him where he was to go next, and all he was to do upon the island.

"Upon my word!" said Caius again to himself, "it seems I am to be taken care of and instructed, truly."

He had a sense of being patronized; but his spirits were high—nothing depressed him; and, remembering the alarming incident of the night before, he felt that the lady's protection might not be unnecessary.

When he got to the front of the house, for the first time in the morning light, he saw that the establishment was of ample size, but kept with no care for a tasteful appearance. There was no path of any sort leading from the gate in the light paling to the door; all was a thick carpet of grass, covering the unlevelled ground. The grass was waving madly in the wind, which coursed freely over undulating fields that here displayed no shrubs or trees of any sort. Caius wondered if the wind always blew on these islands; it was blowing now with the same zest as the day before; the sun poured down with brilliancy upon everything, and the sea, seen in glimpses, was blue and tempestuous. Truly, it seemed a land which the sun and the moon and the wind had elected to bless with lavish self-giving.

When Caius opened the gate of the whitewashed paling, the girl who was to be his guide came round from the back of the house after him, and on her track came a sudden rush of all the other children, who, with curls and garments flying in the wind and delightful bursts of sudden laughter, came to stand in a row again with their tongues outstretched at Caius' retreating form.

The girl could only talk French, and she talked very little of that, giving him "yes" or "no" demurely, as they went up the road which ran inland through the island hills, keeping about midway between sea and sea. Caius saw that the houses and small farms on either side resembled those which he had seen on the other island. Small and rough many of them were; but their whitewashed walls, the strong sunshine, and the large space of grass or pine shrubs that was about each, gave them an appearance of cleanliness. There was no sign of the want or squalor that he had expected; indeed, so prosperous did many of the houses look, that he himself began to have an injured feeling, thinking that he had been brought to befriend people who might very well have befriended themselves.

It was when they came out at a dip in the hills near the outer sea again that the girl stopped, and pointing Caius to a house within sight, went back. This house in the main resembled the other larger houses of the island; but pine and birch trees were beginning to grow high about it, and on entering its enclosure Caius trod upon a gravel path, and noticed banks of earth that in the summer time had held flowers. In front of the white veranda two powerful mastiffs were lying in the sun. These lions were not chained; they were looking for him before he appeared, but did not take the trouble to rise at the sight of him; only a low and ominous rumble, as of thunder beneath the earth, greeted his approach, and gave Caius the strong impression that, if need was, they would arise to some purpose.

A young girl opened the door. She was fresh and pretty-looking, but of plebeian figure and countenance. Her dress was again gray homespun, hanging full and short about her ankles. Her manner was different from that of those people he had been lately meeting, for it had that gentle reserve and formality that bespeaks training. She ushered him into a good-sized room, where three other girls like herself were engaged in sewing. Sitting at a table with a book, from which she had apparently been reading to them, was the woman in the nun-like dress whom he had met before. The walls of the room were of unpainted pinewood, planed to a satin finish, and adorned with festoons of gray moss such as hangs from forest boughs. This was tied with knots of red bittersweet berries; the feathers of sea-birds were also displayed on the walls, and chains of their delicate-coloured eggs were hanging there. Caius had not stepped across the threshold before he began to suspect that he had passed from the region of the real into the ideal.

"She is a romantic-minded woman," he said to himself. "I wonder if she has much sense, after all?"

Then the woman whom he was thus inwardly criticising rose and came across the room to meet him. Her perfect gravity, her dignity of bearing, and her gracious greeting, impressed him in spite of himself. Pictures that one finds in history and fiction of lady abbesses rose before his mind; it was thus that he classified her. His opinion as to the conscious romance of her life altered, for the woman before him was very real, and he knew in a moment that she had seen and suffered much. Her eyes were full of suffering and of solicitude; but it did not seem to him that the suffering and solicitude were in any way connected with a personal need, for there was also peace upon her face.

The room did not contain much furniture. When Caius sat down, and the lady had resumed her seat, he found, as is apt to be the way in empty rooms, that the chairs were near the wall, and that he, sitting facing her, had left nearly the room's width between them. The sewing maidens looked at them with large eyes, and listened to everything that was said; and although they were silent, except for the sound of their stitching, it was so evident that their thoughts must form a running commentary that it gave Caius an odd feeling of acting in company with a dramatic chorus. The lady in front of him had no such feeling; there was nothing more evident about her than that she did not think of how she appeared or how she was observed.

"You are very good to have come." She spoke with a slight French accent, whether natural or acquired he could not tell. Then she left that subject, and began at once to tell the story of the plague upon the island—when it began, what efforts she and a few others had made to arrest it, the carelessness and obstinacy with which the greater part of the people had fostered it, its progress. This was the substance of what she said; but she did not speak of the best efforts as being her own, nor did she call the people stupid and obstinate. She only said:

"They would not have their houses properly cleaned out; they would not wash or burn garments that were infected; they would not use disinfectants, even when we could procure them; they will not yet. You may say that in this wind-swept country there can be nothing in nature to foster such a disease, nothing in the way the houses are built; but the disease came here on a ship, and it is in the houses of the people that it lingers. They will not isolate the sick; they will not——"

She stopped as if at a loss for a word. She had been speaking in a voice whose music was the strain of compassion.

"In fact," said Caius, with some impatience, "they are a set of fools, and worse, for they won't take a telling. Your duty is surely done. They do not deserve that you should risk your life nursing them; they simply deserve to be left to suffer."

She looked at him for a minute, as if earnestly trying to master a view of the case new to her.

"Yes," speaking slowly. He saw that her hands, which were clasped in her lap, pressed themselves more closely together—"yes, that is what they deserve; but, you see, they are very ignorant. They do not see the importance of these precautions; they have not believed me; they will not believe you. They think quite honestly and truly that they will get on well enough in doing their own way."

"Pig-headed!" commented Caius. Then, perceiving that he had not quite carried her judgment along with his: "You yourself, madam, have admitted that they do not deserve that either you or I should sacrifice our lives to them."

"Ah, no," she replied, trouble of thought again in her eyes; "they do not deserve that. But what do we deserve—you and I?"

There was no studied effect in the question. She was like one trying to think more clearly by expressing her thought aloud.

"Madam," replied he, the smile of gallantry upon his lips, "I have no doubt that you deserve the richest blessings of earth and heaven. For myself——" He shrugged his shoulders, just about to say conventionally, flippantly, that he was a sad, worthless fellow, but in some way her sincerity made him sincere, and he finished: "I do not know that I have done anything to forfeit them."

He supposed, as soon as he had said the words, that she would have a theological objection to this view, and oppose it by rote; but there was nothing of disapproval in her mien; there was even a gleam of greater kindliness for him in her eye, and she said, not in answer, but as making a remark by the way:

"That is just as I supposed when I asked you to come. You are like the young ruler, who could not have been conceited because our Lord felt greatly attracted to him."

Before this Caius had had a pleasing consciousness, regarding himself as an interesting stranger talking to a handsome and interested woman. Now he had wit enough to perceive that her interest in him never dipped to the level of ordinary social relationships. He felt a sense of remoteness, and did not even blush, though knowing certainly that satire, although it was not in her mind, was sneering at him from behind the circumstance.

The lady went right on, almost without pause, taking up the thread of her argument: "But when the angels whisper to us that the best blessings of earth and heaven are humility and faith and the sort of love that does not seek its own, do we get up at once and spend our time learning these things? or do we just go on as before, and think our own way good enough? 'We are fools and worse, and will not take a telling.'" A smile broke upon her lip now for the first time as she looked at him. "'Pig-headed!'" she said.

Caius had seen that smile before. It passed instantly, and she sat before him with grave, unruffled demeanour; but all his thoughts and feelings seemed a-whirl. He could not collect his mind; he could not remember what she had said exactly; he could not think what to answer; indeed, he could not think at all. There had been a likeness to his phantastic lady-love of the sea; then it was gone again; but it left him with all his thoughts confounded. At length—because he felt that he must look like a fool indeed—he spoke, stammering the first thing that occurred to him:

"The patient that I have seen did not appear to be in a house that was ill-ventilated or—or—that is, he was isolated from the rest of the family."

He perceived that the lady had not the slightest knowledge of what it was that had really confused him. He knew that in her eyes, in the eyes of the maidens, it must appear that her home-thrust had gone to his heart, that he had changed the subject because too weak to be able to answer her. He was mortified at this, but he could not retrace his steps in the conversation, for she had already answered him.

The household he had already visited, she said, with a few others, had helped her by following sanitary rules; and then she went on talking about what those rules were, what could and could not be done in the circumstances of the families affected.

As she talked on, Caius knew that the thing he had thought must be false and foolish. This woman and that other maiden were not the same in thought, or character, or deed, or aspect. Furthermore, what experience he had made him feel certain that the woman who had known him in that relationship could not be so indifferent to his recognition, so indifferent to all that was in him to which her beauty appealed, as this woman was, and of this woman's indifference he felt convinced.

The provision made for the board and lodging of the new doctor was explained to him. It was not considered safe for him to live with any of the families of the island. A very small wooden building, originally built as a stable, but never used, had been hastily remodelled into a house for him. It was some way further down the winding road, within sight of the house of Madame Le Maitre.

Caius was taken to this new abode, and found that it contained two rooms, furnished with the necessities and many of the comforts of life. The stove was good; abundance of fuel was stacked near the house; simple cooking utensils hung in the outer room; adjoining it, or rather, in a bit of the same building set apart, was a small stable, in which a very good horse was standing. The horse was for his use. If he could be his own bed-maker, cook, and groom, it was evident that he would lack for nothing. A man whom Madame Le Maitre sent showed Caius his quarters, and delivered to him the key; he also said that Madame Le Maitre would be ready in an hour to ride over the island with him and introduce him to all the houses in which there was illness.

Caius was left for the hour to look over his establishment and make friends with his horse. It was all very surprising.



CHAPTER IX.

THE SICK AND THE DEAD.

The bit of road that lay between Madame Le Maitre's house and the house allotted to Caius led, winding down a hill, through a stunted fir-wood. The small firs held out gnarled and knotty branches towards the road; their needles were a dark rich green.

Down this road Caius saw the lady come riding. Her horse was a beautiful beast, hardly more than a colt, of light make and chestnut colour. She herself was not becomingly attired; she wore just the same loose black dress that she had worn in the house, and over the white cap a black hood and cloak were muffled. No doubt in ancient times, before carriages were in use, ladies rode in such feminine wrappings; but the taste of Caius had been formed upon other models. He mounted his own horse and joined her on the road without remark. He had found no saddle, only a blanket with girths, and upon this he supposed he looked quite as awkward as she did. The lady led, and they rode on across the island.

Caius knew that now it was the right time to tell Madame Le Maitre what had occurred the night before, and the ill-usage he had suffered. As she appeared to be the most important person on the island, it was right that she should know of the mysterious band of bandits upon the beach—if, indeed, she did not already know; perhaps it was by power of these she reigned. He found himself able to conjecture almost anything.

When he had quickened his horse and come beside her for the purpose of relating his adventure, she began to speak to him at once. She told him what number of cases of illness were then on her list—six in all. She told him the number who had already died; and then they came past the cemetery upon the hillside, and she pointed out the new-made graves. It appeared that, although at that time there was an abatement in the number of cases, diphtheria had already made sad ravages among the little population; and as the winter would cause the people to shut up their houses more and more closely, it was certain to increase rather than to diminish. Then Madame Le Maitre told him of one case, and of another, in which the family bereavement seemed particularly sad. The stories she told had great detail, but they were not tedious. Caius listened, and forgot that her voice was musical or that her hood and cloak were ugly; he only thought of the actors in the short sad idylls of the island that she put before him.

When they entered the first house, he discovered that she herself had been in the habit of visiting each of the sick every day as nurse, and, as far as her simple skill could go, as doctor too. In this house it was a little child that lay ill, and as soon as Caius saw it he ceased to hope for its recovery. They used the new remedies that he had brought with him, and when he looked round for someone who could continue to apply them, he found that the mother was already dead, and the father took no charge of the child—he was not there. A half-grown boy of about fifteen was its only nurse, and he was not deft or wise, although love, or a rude sense of conscience, had kept him from deserting his post.

"When we have visited the others, I will come back and remain," said Madame Le Maitre.

So they rode on down the hill and along the shingled beach that edged a lagoon. Here the sea lapped softly and they were sheltered from the wind. Here, too, they saw the other islands lying in the crescent they composed, and they saw the waves of the bay break on the sand-bank that was the other arm of the lagoon. Still Caius did not tell about his adventure of the night before. The lady looked preoccupied, as if she was thinking about the Angel of Death that was hovering over the cottage they had left.

The next house was a large one, and here two children were ill. They were well cared for, for two of the young girls whom he had seen in Madame Le Maitre's house were there for the time to nurse them.

They took one of these damsels with them when they went on. She was willing to walk, but Caius set her upon his horse and led it; in this way they made quicker progress. Up a hill they went, and over fields, and in a small house upon a windy slope they found the mother of a family lying very ill. Here, after Caius had said all that there was to say, and Madame Le Maitre, with skilful hands, had done all that she could do in a short time, they left the young girl.

At the next and last house of their round, where the day before one child had been ill, they now found three tossing and crying with pain and fever. When it was time for them to go, Caius saw his companion silently wring her hands at the thought of leaving them, for the mother, worn out and very ignorant, was the only nurse. It did not seem that it could be helped. Caius went out to his horse, and Madame Le Maitre to hers, but he saw her stand beside it as if too absent in mind to spring to its back; her face was looking up into the blue above.

"You are greatly troubled," said Caius.

"Oh yes," her voice was low, but it came like the sound of a cry. "I do not know what to do. All these months I have begged and entreated the people to keep away from those houses where there was illness. It was their only hope. And now that they begin to understand that, I cannot bring the healthy to nurse the sick, even if they were willing to come. They will take no precautions as we do. It is not safe; I have tried it."

She did not look at Caius, she was looking at the blue that hung over the sea which lay beneath them, but the weariness of a long long effort was in her tone.

"Could we not manage to bring them all to one house that would serve as a hospital?"

"Now that you have come, perhaps we can," she said, "but at present——" She looked helplessly at the door of the house they had left.

"At present I will nurse these children," Caius said. "I do not need to see the others again until evening."

He tied his horse in a shed, and nursed the children until the moon was bright. Then, when he had left them as well as might be for the night, he set out to return on his former track by memory. The island was very peaceful; on field or hill or shore he met no one, except here and there a plodding fisherman, who gave him "Good-evening" without apparently knowing or caring who he was. The horse they knew, no doubt, that was enough.

He made the same round as before, beginning at the other end. At the house where the woman was ill the girl who was nursing her remained. At the next house the young girl, who was dressed for the road, ingenuously claimed his protection for her homeward way.

"I will go with you, monsieur, it will be more safe for me."

So he put her on his horse, but they did not talk to one another.

At the third house they found Madame Le Maitre weeping passionately over a dead baby, and the lout of a boy weeping with her. It surprised Caius to feel suddenly that he could almost have wept, too, and yet he believed that the child was better dead.

Someone had been out into the winter fields and gathered the small white everlasting flowers that were still waving there, and twined them in the curls of the baby's hair, and strewed them upon the meagre gray sheet that covered it.

When they rode down to the village they were all quite silent. Caius felt as if he had lived a long time upon this island. His brain was full of plans for a hospital and for disinfecting the furniture of the houses.

He visited the good man in whose barn he had slept the preceding night. He went to his little house and fed himself and his horse. He discovered his portmanteaus that O'Shea had promised to deliver, and found that their contents had not been tampered with; but even this did not bring his mind back with great interest to the events of the former night. He was thinking of other things, and yet he hardly knew of what he was thinking.



CHAPTER X.

A LIGHT-GIVING WORD.

The next morning, before Caius went out, he wrote a short statement of all that had occurred beside the quicksand. The motive that prompted him to do this was the feeling that it would be difficult for him to make the statement to Madame Le Maitre verbally. He began to realize that it was not easy for him to choose the topics of conversation when they were together.

She did not ride with him next day, as now he knew the road, but in the course of the morning he saw her at the house where the three children were ill, and she came out into the keen air with him to ask some questions, and no doubt for the necessary refreshment of leaving the close house, for she walked a little way on the dry, frozen grass.

Heavy as was the material of her cloak and hood, the strong wind toyed with its outer parts as with muslin, but it could not lift the closely-tied folds that surrounded her face and heavily draped her figure. Caius stood with her on the frozen slope. Beneath them they could see the whole stretch of the shining sand-dune that led to the next island, the calm lagoon and the rough water in the bay beyond. It did not seem a likely place for outlaws to hide in; the sun poured down on every hill and hollow of the sand.

Caius explained then that his portmanteaus, with the stores, had arrived safely; but that he had reason to think that the man O'Shea was not trusty, that, either out of malice or fear of the companions among whom he found himself, he had threatened his, Dr. Simpson's, life in the most unwarrantable manner. He then presented the statement which he had drawn up, and commended it to her attention.

Madame Le Maitre had listened to his words without obvious interest; in fact, he doubted if she had got her mind off the sick children before she opened the paper. He would have liked to go away now, leaving the paper with her, but she did not give him that opportunity.

"Ah! this is——" Then, more understandingly, "This is an account you have written of your journey hither?"

Caius intimated that it was merely a complaint against O'Shea. Yet he felt sure, while she was reading it, that, if she had any liveliness of fancy, she must be interested in its contents, and if she had proper appreciation, she must know that he had expressed himself well. When she had finished, however, instead of coveting the possession of the document, she gently gave it back to him.

"I am sorry," she said sincerely, "that you were put to inconvenience. It was so kind of you to come, that I had hoped to make your journey as comfortable as possible; but the sands are very treacherous, not because the quicksands are large or deep, but because they shift in stormy weather, sometimes appearing in one place, and sometimes in another. It has been explained"—she was looking at him now, quite interested in what she was saying—"by men who have visited these islands, that this is to be accounted for by the beds of gypsum that lie under the sand, for under some conditions the gypsum will dissolve."

The explanation concerning the gypsum was certainly interesting, but the nature of the quicksand was not the point which Caius had brought forward.

"It is this fact, that one cannot tell where the sand will be soft, that makes it necessary to have a guide in travelling over the beach. The people here become accustomed to the appearance of the soft places, but it seems that O'Shea must have been deceived by the moonlight."

"I do not blame him for the accident," said Caius, "but for what happened afterwards."

Her slight French accent gave to each of her words a quaint, distinct form of its own. "O'Shea is—he is what you might call funny in his way of looking at things." She paused a moment, as if entirely conscious of the inadequacy of the explanation. "I do not think," she continued, as if in perplexity, "that I can explain this matter any more; but if you will talk to O'Shea——"

"Madam," burst out Caius, "can it be that there is a large band of lawless men who have their haunts so near this island, and you do not know of it? That," he added, with emphatic reproach, "is impossible."

"I never heard of any such band of men."

Madame Le Maitre spoke gently, and the dignity of her gentleness was such that Caius was ashamed of his vehemence and his reproach. What he wondered at, what he chafed at, was, that she showed no wonder concerning an incident which her last statement made all the more remarkable. She began to turn to go towards the house, and the mind of Caius hit upon the one weak point in her own acknowledged view of the matter.

"You have said that it is not safe for a stranger to walk upon the sands without a guide; if you doubt my statement that these men threatened my life, it yet remains that I was left to finish my journey alone. I do not believe that there was danger myself. I do not believe that a man would sink over his head in these holes; but according to their belief and yours, madam——"

He stopped, for she had turned round with a distinct flash of disapproval in her eyes.

"I do not doubt your statement." She paused, and he knew that his accusation had been rude. "It would not occur to me"—there was still the slight quaintness of one unaccustomed to English—"that you could do anything unworthy of a gentleman." Another pause, and Caius knew that he was bound over to keep the peace. "I think O'Shea got himself into trouble, and that he did the best he could for you; but O'Shea lives not far from your own house. He is not my servant, except that he rents my husband's land." She paused again.

Caius would have urged that he had understood otherwise, or that hitherto he had not found O'Shea either civil or communicative; but it appeared that the lady had something more to say after her emphasis of pause, and when she said it Caius bid her good-day without making further excuse or justification. She said:

"I did not understand from O'Shea that he allowed you to walk on the sands without some one who would have warned you if there had been danger."

When Caius was riding on his way, he experienced something of that feeling of exaltation that he had felt in the presence of his inexplicable lady-love. Had he not proof at least now that she was no dream or phantasy, and more than that, that she inhabited the same small land with him? These people knew her; nay (his mind worked quickly), was it not evident that she had been the link of connection between them and himself? She knew him, then—his home, his circumstances, his address. (His horse was going now where and how it would; the man's mind was confounded by the questions that came upon it pell-mell, none waiting for an answer.) In that other time when she had lived in the sea, and he had seen her from the desolate bit of coast, who was she? Where had she really lived? In what way could she have gained her information concerning him? What could have tempted her to play the part of a fishy thing? He remembered the monstrous skin that had covered her; he remembered her motion in the water. Then he thought of her in the gray homespun dress, such as a maid might trip her garden in, as he had seen her travelling between the surf and the dune in the winter blast. Well, he lived in an enchanted land; he had to deal with men and women of no ordinary stuff and make, but they acknowledged their connection with her. He was sure that she must be near him. The explanation must come—of that, burning with curiosity as he was, he recked little. A meeting must come; all his pulses tingled with the thought. It was a thought of such a high sort of bliss to him that it seemed to wrap and enfold his other thoughts; and when he remembered again to guide his horse—all that day as he went about his work—he lived in it and worked in it.

He went that evening to visit O'Shea, who lived in a good-sized house half a mile or so from his own. From this interview, and from the clue which Madame Le Maitre had given, he began strongly to suspect that, for some reason unknown, O'Shea's threatenings were to be remembered more in the light of a practical joke than as serious. As to where the men had come from who had played their part, as to where the boy had gone to, or whether the boy and the lady were one—on these heads he got no light. The farmer affected stupidity—affected not to understand his questions, or answered them with such whimsical information on the wrong point that little was revealed. Yet Caius did not quarrel with O'Shea. Was it not possible that he, rude, whimsical man that he was, might have influence with the sea-maid of the laughing face?

Next morning Caius received a formal message—the compliments of Madame Le Maitre, and she would be glad if he would call upon her before he went elsewhere. He passed again between the growling mastiffs, and found the lady with her maidens engaged in the simple household tasks that were necessary before they went to their work of mercy. Madame Le Maitre stood as she spoke to him:

"When I wrote to you I said that if you came to us you would have no chance of returning until the spring. I find that that is not true. Our winter has held off so long that another vessel from the mainland has called—you can see her lying in the bay. She will be returning to Picton to-morrow. I think it right to tell you this; not that we do not need you now as much as we did at first; not but that my hope and courage would falter if you went; but now that you have seen the need for yourself, how great or how little it is, just as you may think, you ought to reconsider, and decide whether you will stay or not."

Caius spoke hastily:

"I will stay."

"Think! it is for four months of snow and ice, and you will receive no letters, see no one that you could call a friend."

"I will stay."

"You have already taught me much; with the skill that you have imparted and the stores that you have brought, which I will pay for, we should be much better off than if you had not come. We should still feel only gratitude to you."

"I have no thought of leaving."

"Remember, you think now that you have come that it is only a handful of people that you can benefit, and they will not comprehend the sacrifice that you have made, or be very grateful."

"Yes, I think that," replied Caius, admitting her insight. "At the same time, I will remain."

She sighed, and her sigh was explained by her next words:

"Yet you do not remain for love of the work or the people."

Caius felt that his steady assertion that he would remain had perhaps appeared to vaunt a heroism that was not true. He supposed that she had seen his selfishness of motive, and that it was her time now to let him see that she had not much admiration for him, so that he might make his choice without bias.

"It is true that I do not love the people, but I will pass the winter here."

If the lady had had the hard thought of him that he attributed to her, there was no further sign of it, for she thanked him now with a gratitude so great that silent tears trembled in her eyes.



CHAPTER XI.

THE LADY'S HUSBAND.

It was impossible but that Caius should take a keen interest in his medical work. It was the first time that he had stood alone to fight disease, and the weight of the responsibility added zest to his care of each particular case. It was, however, natural to him to be more interested in the general weal than in the individual, more interested in a theoretical problem than in its practical working. His mind was concerned now as to where and how the contagion hid itself, reappearing as it had done, again and again in unlikely places; for there could be assuredly no home for it in air, or sea, or land. Nor could drains be at fault, for there were none. Next to this, the subject most constantly in his mind was the plan of the hospital.

Madame Le Maitre had said to him: "I have tried to persuade the people to bring their sick to beds in my house, where we would nurse them, but they will not. It is because they are angry to think that the sick from different families would be put together and treated alike. They have great notions of the differences between themselves, and they cannot realize the danger, or believe that this plan would avert it; but now that you have come, no doubt you will be able to explain to them more clearly. Perhaps they will listen to you, because you are a man and a doctor. Also, what I have said will have had time to work. You may reap where I have sown."

She had looked upon him encouragingly, and Caius had felt encouraged; but when he began to talk to the people, both courage and patience quickly ebbed. He could not countenance the plan of bringing the sick into the house where Madame Le Maitre and the young girls lived. He wanted the men who were idle in the winter time to build a temporary shed of pine-wood, which would have been easy enough, but the men laughed at him. The only reason that Caius did not give them back scorn for scorn and anger for their lazy indifference was the reason that formed his third and greatest interest in his work; this was his desire to please Madame Le Maitre.

If he had never known and loved the lady of the sea, he thought that his desire to please Madame Le Maitre would have been almost the same. She exercised over him an inexplicable influence, and he would have felt almost superstitious at being under this spell if he had not observed that everyone who came much in contact with her, and who was able to appreciate her, was ruled also, and that, not by any claim of authority she put forth, but just because it seemed to happen so. She was more unconscious of this influence than anyone. Those under her rule comprised one or two of the better men of the island, many of the poor women, the girls in her house, and O'Shea. With regard to himself, Caius knew that her influence, if not augmented, was supplemented, by his belief that in pleasing her he was making his best appeal to the favour of the woman he loved.

He never from the first day forgot his love in his work. His business was to do all that he could to serve Madame Le Maitre, whose heart was in the healing of the people, but his business also was to find out the answer to the riddle in which his own heart was bound up. The first step in this, obviously, was to know more about Madame Le Maitre and O'Shea. The lady he dared not question; the man he questioned with persistency and with what art he could command.

It was one night, not a week after his advent, that he had so far come to terms with O'Shea that he sat by the stove in the latter's house, and did what he could to keep up conversation with little aid from his host.

O'Shea sat on one wooden chair, with his stockinged feet crossed upon another, and his legs forming a bridge between. He was smoking, and in the lamplight his smooth, queer face looked like a brown apple that had begun to shrivel—just begun, for O'Shea was not old, and only a little wrinkled.

His wife came often into the room, and stood looking with interest at Caius. She was a fair woman, with a broad tranquil face and much light hair that was brushed smoothly.

Caius talked of the weather, for the snow was falling. Then, after awhile:

"By the way, O'Shea, who is Madame Le Maitre?"

The other had not spoken for a long time; now he took his clay pipe out of his mouth, and answered promptly:

"An angel from heaven."

"Ah, yes; that, of course."

Caius stroked his moustache with the action habitual to drawing-room gallantry; then, instead of persisting, he formed his question a little differently:

"Who is Mr. Le Maitre?"

"Sea-captain," said O'Shea.

"Oh! then where is he?"

"Don't know."

"Isn't that rather strange, that his wife should be here, and that you should not know where the husband is?"

"I can't see the ships on the other side of the world."

"Where did he go to?"

"Well, when he last sailed"—deliberately—"he went to Newcastle. His ship is what they call a tramp; it don't belong to any loine. So at Newcastle she was hired to go to Africy. Like enough, there she got cargo for some place else."

"Oh! a very long voyage."

"She carries steam; the longest voyage comes to an end quick enough in these days."

"Has Madame Le Maitre always lived on this island? Was she married here?"

"She came here a year this October past. She came from a place near the Pierced Rock, south of Gaspe Basin. I lived there myself. I came here because the skipper had good land here that she said I could farm."

Caius meditated on this.

"Then, you have known her ever since she was a child?"

"Saw her married."

"What does her husband look like?"

"Well"—a long pause of consideration—"like a man."

"What sort of a man?"

"Neither like you nor me."

"I never noticed that we were alike."

"You trim your beard, I haven't any; the skipper, he's hairy."

Caius conceived a great disgust for the captain. He felt pretty well convinced also that he was no favourite with O'Shea. He would have liked much to ask if Madame Le Maitre liked her husband, but if his own refinement had not forbidden, he had a wholesome idea that O'Shea, if roused, would be a dangerous enemy.

"I don't understand why, if she is married, she wears the dress of a religious order."

"Never saw a nun dressed jist like her. Guess if you went about kissing and embracing these women ye would find it an advantage to be pretty well covered up; but"—here a long time of puffing at the pipe—"it's an advantage for more than women not to see too much of an angel."

"Has she any relations, anyone of her own family? Where do they live?"

There was no answer.

"I suppose you knew her people?"

O'Shea sprang up and opened the house door, and the snow drove in as he held it.

"I thought," he said, "I heard a body knocking."

"No one knocked," said Caius impatiently.

"I heard someone." He stood looking very suspiciously out, and so good was his acting, if it was acting, that Caius, who came and looked over his shoulder, had a superstitious feeling when he saw the blank, untrodden snow stretching wide and white into the glimmering night. He remembered that the one relative he believed the lady to have had appeared to him in strange places and vanished strangely.

"You didn't hear a knock; you were dreaming." Caius began to button on his coat.

"I wasn't even asleep." O'Shea gave a last suspicious look to the outside.

"O'Shea," said Caius, "has—has Madame Le Maitre a daughter?"

The farmer turned round to him in astonishment. "Bless my heart alive, no!"

The snow was only two or three inches deep when Caius walked home; it was light as plucked swan's-down about his feet. Everywhere it was falling slowly in small dry flakes. There was little wind to make eddies in it. The waning moon had not yet risen, but the landscape, by reason of its whiteness, glimmered just visible to the sight.



CHAPTER XII.

THE MAIDEN INVENTED.

The fishing-boats and small schooners were dragged high up on the beach. The ice formed upon the bay that lay in the midst of the islands. The carpet of snow grew more and more thick upon field and hill, and where the dwarf firwoods grew so close that it could not pass between their branches, it draped them, fold above fold, until one only saw the green here and there standing out from the white garment.

In these days a small wooden sleigh was given to Caius, to which he might harness his horse, and in which he might sit snug among oxskins if he preferred that sort of travelling to riding. Madame Le Maitre still rode, and Caius discarded his sleigh and rode also. Missing the warmth of the skins, he was soon compelled by the cold to copy Robinson Crusoe and make himself breeches and leggings of the hides.

In these first weeks one hope was always before his eyes. In every new house which he entered, at every turn of the roads, which began to be familiar to him, he hoped to see the maiden who had followed him upon the beach. He dreamed of her by night; he not only hoped, he expected to see her each day. It was of course conceivable that she might have returned to some other island of the group; but Caius did not believe this, because he felt convinced she must be under the protection of his friends; and also, since he had arrived the weather had been such that it would have been an event known to all the fishermen if another party had made a journey along the sands. When the snow came the sands were impassable. As soon as the ice on the bay would bear, there would be coming and going, no doubt; but until then Caius had the restful security that she was near him, and that it could not be many days before he saw her. The only flaw in his conclusion was that the fact did not bear it out; he did not see her.

At length it became clear that the maiden was hiding herself. Caius ceased to hope that he would meet her by chance, because he knew he would already have done so if it were not willed otherwise. Then his mind grew restless again, and impatient; he could not even imagine where she could lie hidden, or what possible reason there could be for a life of uncomfortable concealment.

Caius had not allowed either O'Shea or Madame Le Maitre to suspect that in his stumble he had involuntarily seen his companion on the midnight journey. He did not think that the sea-maid herself knew that he had seen her there. He might have been tempted now to believe that the vision was some bright illusion, if its reality had not been proved by the fact that Madame Le Maitre knew that he had a companion, and that O'Shea had staked much that he should not take that long moonlight walk by her side.

Since the day on which he had become sure that the sea-maid had such close and real connection with human beings that he met every day, he had ceased to have those strange and uncomfortable ideas about her, which, in half his moods, relegated her into the region of freaks practised upon mortals by the denizens of the unseen, or, still farther, into the region of dreams that have no reality. However, now that she had retired again into hiding, this assurance of his was small comfort.

He would have resolutely inquired of Madame Le Maitre who it was who had been sent to warn him of danger if need be upon the beach, but that the lady was not one to allow herself willingly to be questioned, and in exciting her displeasure he might lose the only chance of gaining what he sought. Then, too, with the thought of accosting the lady upon this subject there always arose in his mind the remembrance of the brief minute in which, to his own confounding, he had seen the face of the sea-maid in the lady's own face, and a phantom doubt came to him as to whether she were not herself the sea-maid, disfigured and made aged by the wrappings she wore. He did not, however, believe this. He had every reason to refuse the belief; and if he had had no other, this woman's character was enough, it appeared to him, to give the lie to the thought. A more intelligent view concerning that fleeting likeness was that the two women were nearly related to one another, the younger in charge of the elder; and that the younger, who had for some purpose or prank played about in the waters near his home, must have lived in some house there, must have means of communication with the place, and must have acquainted Madame Le Maitre with his position when the need of a physician arose. What was so dissatisfying to him was that all this was the merest conjecture, that the lady whom he loved was a person whom he had been obliged to invent in order to explain the appearances that had so charmed him. He had not a shadow of proof of her existence.

The ice became strong, and bridged over the bay that lay within the crescent of islands. All the islands, with their dunes, were covered with snow; the gales which had beaten up the surf lessened in force; and on the long snow-covered beaches there was only a fringe of white breakers upon the edge of a sea that was almost calm.

The first visitor of any importance who came across the bay was the English clergyman. Nearly all the people on Cloud Island were Protestants, in so far as they had any religion. They were not a pious people, but it seemed that this priest had been exceedingly faithful to them in their trouble, and when he had been obliged to close the church for fear of the contagion, had visited them regularly, except in those few weeks between the seasons when the road by the beach had been almost impassable.

Caius was first aware of the advent of this welcome visitor by a great thumping at his door one morning before he had started on his daily round. On opening it, he saw a hardy little man in a fur coat, who held out his hand to him in enthusiastic greeting.

"Well, now, this is what I call being a good boy—a very good boy—to come here to look after these poor folk."

Caius disclaimed the virtue which he did not feel.

"Motives! I don't care anything about motives. The point is to do the right thing. I'm a good boy to come and visit them; you're a good boy to come and cure them. They are not a very grateful lot, I'm sorry to say, but we have nothing to do with that; we're put here to look after them, and what we feel about it, or what they feel about it, is not the question."

He had come into Caius' room, stamping the snow off his big boots. He was a spare, elderly man, with gray hair and bright eyes. His horse and sleigh stood without the door, and the horse jingled its bells continually.

Here was a friend! Caius decided at once to question this man concerning Madame Le Maitre, and—that other lady in whose existence he believed.

"The main thing that you want on these islands is nerve," said the clergyman. "It would be no good at all now"—argumentatively—"for the Bishop to send a man here who hadn't nerve. You never know where you'll meet a quicksand, or a hole in the ice. Chubby and I nearly went under this morning and never were seen again. Some of these fellows had been cutting a hole, and—well, we just saw it in time. It would have been the end of us, I can tell you; but then, you see, if you are being a good boy and doing what you're told, that does not matter so much."

It appeared that Chubby was the clergyman's pony. In a short time Caius had heard of various other adventures which she and her master had shared together. He was interested to know if any of them would throw any light upon the remarkable conduct of O'Shea and his friends; but they did not.

"The men about here," he said—"I can't make anything out of them—are they lawless?"

"You see"—in explanatory tone—"if you take a man and expose him to the sea and the wind for half his life, you'll find that he is pretty much asleep the other half. He may walk about with his eyes open, but his brain's pretty much asleep; he's just equal to lounging and smoking. There are just two things these men can do—fish, and gather the stuff from wrecks. They'll make from eight dollars a day at the fishing, and from sixteen to twenty when a wreck's in. They can afford to be idle the rest of the time, and they are gloriously idle."

"Do they ever gather in bands to rob wrecked ships, or for other unlawful purposes?"

"Oh no, not in the least! Oh no, nothing of the kind! They'll steal from a wreck, of course, if they get the chance; but on the sly, not by violence. Their worst sin is independence and self-righteousness. You can't teach the children anything in the schools, for instance, for the parents won't have them punished; they are quite sure that their children never do anything wrong. That comes of living so far out of the world, and getting their living so easily. I can tell you, Utopia has a bad effect on character."

Caius let the matter go for that time; he had the prospect of seeing the clergyman often.

Another week, when the clergyman had come to the island and Caius met him by chance, they had the opportunity of walking up a long snowy hill together, leading their horses. Caius asked him then about Madame Le Maitre and O'Shea, and heard a plain consecutive tale of their lives and of their coming to the island, which denuded the subject of all unknown elements and appeared to rob it of special interest.

Captain Le Maitre, it appeared, had a life-long lease of the property on Cloud Island, and also some property on the mainland south of Gaspe Basin; but the land was worth little except by tillage, and, being a seaman, he neglected it. His father had had the land before him. Pembroke, the clergyman, had seen his father. He had never happened to see the son, who would now be between forty and fifty years of age; but when Madame Le Maitre had come to look after the farm on Cloud Island, she had made herself known to him as in charge of her husband's affairs. She found that she could not get the land worked by the islanders, and had induced O'Shea, who it seemed was an old farm hand of her own father's, to settle upon this farm, which was a richer one than the one he had had upon the mainland. The soil of the islands, Pembroke said, was in reality exceedingly rich, but in no case had it ever been properly worked, and he was in hopes that now Madame Le Maitre might produce a model farm, which would be of vast good in showing the islanders how much they lost by their indifferent manner of treating their land.

"Why did she come to the islands?"

"Conscientiousness, I think. The land here was neglected; the people here certainly present a field white to harvest to anyone who has the missionary spirit."

"Is she—is she very devout?" asked Caius.

"Well, yes, in her own way she is—mind, I say in her own way. I couldn't tell you, now, whether she is Protestant or Papist; I don't believe she knows herself."

"He that sitteth between two stools——" suggested Caius, chiefly for want of something to say.

"Well, no, I wouldn't say that. Bless you! the truest hearts on God's earth don't trouble about religious opinions; they have got the essential oil expressed out of them, and that's all they want."

To Caius this subject of the lady's religion appeared a matter in which he had no need to take interest, but the other went on:

"She was brought up in a convent, you know—a country convent somewhere on the Gaspe coast, and, from what she tells me, the nuns had the good policy to make her happy. She tells me that where the convent gardens abutted on the sea, she and her fellows used to be allowed to fish and row about. You see, her mother had been a Catholic, and the father, being an old miser, had money, so I suppose the sisters thought they could make a nun of her; and very likely they would have done, for she is just that sort, but the father stopped that little game by making her marry before he died."

"I always had an idea that the people on the coast up there were all poor and quite uneducated."

"Well, yes, for the most part they are pretty much what you would see on these islands; but our Bishop tells me that, here and there, there are excellent private houses, and the priests' houses and the convents are tolerably well off. But, to tell you the truth, I think this lady's father had some education, and his going to that part of the country may be accounted for by what she told me once about her mother. Her mother was a dancer, a ballet-dancer, a very estimable and pious woman, her daughter says, and I have no doubt it is true; but an educated man who makes that sort of marriage, you know, may prefer to live out of the world."

Caius was becoming interested.

"If she has inherited her mother's strength and lightness, that explains how she gets on her horse. By Jove! I never saw a woman jump on a horse without help as she does."

"Just so; she has marvellous strength and endurance, and the best proof of that, is the work she is doing nowadays. Why, with the exception of three days that she came to see my wife, and would have died if she hadn't, she has worked night and day among these sick people for the last six months. She came to see my wife pretty much half dead, but the drive on the sand and a short rest pretty well set her up again."

Pembroke drifted off here into discourse about the affairs of his parish, which comprised all the Protestant inhabitants of the island. His voice went on in the cheerful, jerky, matter-of-fact tone in which he always talked. Caius did not pay much heed, except that admiration for the sweet spirit of the man and for the pluck and hardihood with which he carried on his work, grew in him in spite of his heedlessness, for there was nothing that Pembroke suspected less than that he himself was a hero.

"Pretty tough work you have of it," said Caius at last; "if it was only christening and marrying and burying them all, you would have more than enough to do, with the distances so great."

"Oh, bless you! my boy, yes; it's the distance and the weather; but what are we here for but to do our work? Life isn't long, any way, but I'll tell you what it is—a man needs to know the place to know what he can do and what he can't. Now, the Bishop comes over for a week in summer—I don't know a finer man than our Bishop anywhere; he doesn't give himself much rest, and that's a fact; but they've sent him out from England, and what does he know about these islands? He said to me that he wanted me to have morning service every Sunday, as I have it at Harbour Island, and service every Sunday afternoon here on The Cloud."

"He might as well have suggested that you had morning service on the Magdalens, afternoon service in Newfoundland, and evening service in Labrador."

"Exactly, just as possible, my boy; but they had the diphtheria here, so I couldn't bring him over, even in fair weather, to see how he liked the journey."

All this time Caius was cudgelling his brains to know how to bring the talk back to Madame Le Maitre, and he ended by breaking in with an abrupt inquiry as to how old she was.

A slight change came over Pembroke's demeanour. It seemed to Caius that his confidential tone lapsed into one of suspicious reserve.

"Not very old"—dryly.

Caius perceived that he was being suspected of taking an undue interest in the benefactress of the island. The idea, when it came from another, surprised him.

"Look here! I don't take much interest in Madame Le Maitre, except that she seems a saint and I'd like to please her; but what I want to know is this—there is a girl who is a sister, or niece, or daughter, or some other relation of hers, who is on these islands. Who is she, and where is she?"

"Do you mean any of the girls she has in her house? She took them from families upon the island only for the sake of training them."

"I don't mean any of those girls!"—this with emphasis.

"I don't know who you mean."

Caius turned and faced him. Do what he would, he could not hide his excited interest.

"You surely must know. It is impossible that there should be a girl, young, beautiful and refined, living somewhere about here, and you not know."

"I should say so—quite impossible."

"Then, be kind enough to tell me who she is. I have an important reason for asking."

"My dear boy, I would tell you with all the pleasure in the world if I knew."

"I have seen her." Caius spoke in a solemn voice.

The priest looked at him with evident interest and curiosity. "Well, where was she, and who was she?"

"You must know: you are in Madame Le Maitre's confidence; you travel from door to door, day in and day out; you know everybody and everything upon these islands."

"I assure you," said the priest, "that I never heard of such a person."



CHAPTER XIII.

WHITE BIRDS; WHITE SNOW; WHITE THOUGHTS.

By degrees Caius was obliged to give up his last lingering belief in the existence of the lady he loved. It was a curious position to be in, for he loved her none the less. Two months of work and thought for the diseased people had slipped away, and by the mere lapse of time, as well as by every other proof, he had come to know that there was no maiden in any way connected with Madame Le Maitre who answered to the visions he had seen, or who might be wooed by the man who had ceased to care for all other women for her sweet sake.

After Caius had arrived the epidemic had become worse, as it had been prophesied it would, when the people began to exclude the winter air from their houses. In almost every family upon the little isle there was a victim, and Caius, under the compelling force of the orders which Madame Le Maitre never gave and the wishes she never expressed, became nurse as well as doctor, using what skill he had in every possible office for the sick, working early and late, and many a time the night through. It was not a time to prattle of the sea-maid to either Madame Le Maitre or O'Shea, who both of them worked at his side in the battle against death, and were, Caius verily believed, more heroic and successful combatants than himself. Some solution concerning his lady-love there must be, and Caius neither forgot nor gave up his intention of probing the lives of these two to discover what he wished; but the foreboding that the discovery would work him no weal made it the easier to lay the matter aside and wait. They were all bound in the same icy prison; he could afford patience.

The question of the hospital had been solved in this way. Madame Le Maitre had taken O'Shea and his wife and children to live with her, and such patients as could be persuaded or forced into hospital were taken to his house and nursed there. Then, also, as the disease became more prevalent, people who had thus far refused all sanitary measures, in dire fear opened their doors, and allowed Caius and O'Shea to enter with whitewash brushes and other means of disinfection.

Caius was successful in this, that, in proportion to the number of people who were taken ill, the death-rate was only one third of what it had been before he came. He and his fellow-workers were successful also in a more radical way, for about the end of January it was suddenly observed among them that there were no new cases of illness. The ill and the weak gradually recovered. In a few more weeks the Angels of Death and Disease retired from the field, and the island was not depopulated. Whether another outbreak might or might not occur they could not tell; but knowing the thoroughness of the work which they had done, they were ready to hope that the victory was complete. Gradually their work ceased, for there was no one in all the happy island who needed nursing or medical attendance. Caius found then how wonderfully free the place was from all those ailments which ordinarily beset humanity.

This was in the middle of February, when the days were growing long, and even the evening was bright and light upon the islands of snow and the sea of ice.

It appeared to Caius that Madame Le Maitre had grown years older during the pestilence. Deep lines of weariness had come in her face, and her eyes were heavy with want of sleep and sympathetic tears. Again and again he had feared that the disease would attack her, and, indeed, he knew that it had only been the constant riding about the island hills in the wonderful air that had kept the little band of workers in health. As it was, O'Shea had lost a child, and three of the girls in the house of Madame Le Maitre had been ill. Now that the strain was over, Caius feared prostration that would be worse than the disease itself for the lady who had kept up so bravely through it all; but, ever feeling an impossibility in her presence of speaking freely of anything that concerned herself, he had hardly been able to express the solicitude he felt before it was relieved by the welcome news that she had travelled across the bay to pay a visit to Pembroke's wife.

She had gone without either telling Caius of her intention or bidding him good-bye, and, glad as he was, he felt that he had not deserved this discourtesy at her hands. Indeed, looking back now, he felt disposed to resent the indifference with which she had treated him from first to last. Not as the people's doctor. In that capacity she had been eager for his services, and grateful to him with a speechless, reverent gratitude that he felt to be much more than his due; but as a man, as a companion, as a friend, she had been simply unconscious of his existence. When she had said to him at the beginning, "You will be lonely; there is no one on the island to whom you can speak as a friend," he perceived now that she had excluded herself as well as the absent world from his companionship. It seemed to him that it had never once occurred to her that it was in her power to alter this.

Truly, if it had not been for Pembroke, the clergyman, Caius would never have had a companionable word; and he had found that there were limits to the interest he could take in Pembroke, that the stock of likings and disliking that they had in common was not great. Then, too, since the day on which he had questioned him so vehemently about the relatives of Madame Le Maitre, he fancied that the clergyman had treated him with apprehensive reserve.

At the time when he had little or nothing to do, and when Madame Le Maitre had left Cloud Island, Caius would have been glad enough to go and explore the other islands, or to luxuriate again in the cookery of the old maids at the inn at which he had first been housed. Two considerations kept him from this holiday-taking. In the first place, in fear of a case of illness he did not like to leave the island while its benefactress was away; and, secondly, it was reported that all visitors from The Cloud were ruthlessly shut out from the houses upon the other islands, because of the unreasoning terror which had grown concerning the disease. Whether he, who carried money in his pocket, would be shut out from these neighbouring islands also, he did not care to inquire. He felt too angry with the way the inhabitants behaved to have any dealings with them.

The only means of amusement that remained to Caius in these days were his horse and a gun that O'Shea lent him. With his lunch in his pocket, he rode upon the ice as far as he might go and return the same day. He followed the roads that led by the shores of the other islands; or, where the wind had swept all depth of snow from the ice, he took a path according to his own fancy on the untrodden whiteness.

Colonies of Arctic gulls harboured on the island, and the herring gulls remained through the winter; these, where he could get near their rocks upon the ice, he at first took delight in shooting; but he soon lost the zest for this sport, for the birds gave themselves to his gun too easily. He was capable of deriving pleasure from them other than in their slaughter, and often he rode under their rocky homes, noting how dark their white plumage looked against their white resting-places, where groups of them huddled together upon the icy battlements and snowdrift towers of the castles that the frost had built them. He would ride by slowly, and shoot his gun in the air to see them rise and wheel upward, appearing snow-white against the blue firmament; and watched them sink again, growing dark as they alighted among the snow and ice. His warning that he himself must be nearing home was to see the return of such members of the bird-colony as had been out for the deep-sea fishing. When he saw them come from afar, flying high, often with their wings dyed pink in the sunset rays, he knew that his horse must gallop homeward, or darkness might come and hide such cracks and fissures in the ice as were dangerous.

The haunts of the birds which he chiefly loved were on the side of the islands turned to the open sea, for at this time ice had formed on all sides, and stretched without a break for a mile or so into the open. There was a joy in riding upon this that made riding upon the bay tame and uninteresting; for not only was the seaward shore of island and dune wilder, but the ice here might at any time break from the shore or divide itself up into large islands, and when the wind blew he fancied he heard the waves heaving beneath it, and the excitement which comes with danger, which, by some law of mysterious nature, is one of the keenest forms of pleasure, would animate his horse and himself as they flew over it.

His horse was not one of the native ponies; it was a well-bred, delicately-shaped beast, accustomed to be made a friend of by its rider, and giving sympathetic response to all his moods. The horse belonged to Madame Le Maitre, and was similar to the one she rode. This, together with many other things, proved to Caius that the lady who lived so frugally had command of a certain supply of money, for it could not be an easy or cheap thing to transport good horses to these islands.

Whatever he did, however his thoughts might be occupied, it was never long before they veered round to the subject that was rapidly becoming the one subject of absorbing interest to him. Before he realized what he did, his mind was confirmed in its habit; at morn, and at noontime, and at night, he found himself thinking of Madame Le Maitre. The lady he was in love with was the youthful, adventurous maiden who, it seemed, did not exist; the lady that he was always thinking of was the grave, subdued, self-sacrificing woman who in some way, he knew not how, carried the mystery of the other's existence within herself. His mind was full of almost nothing but questions concerning her, for, admire and respect her as he might, he thought there was nothing in him that responded with anything like love to her grave demeanour and burdened spirit.



CHAPTER XIV.

THE MARRIAGE SCENE.

By riding across the small lagoon that lay beside Cloud Island to the inward side of the bay, and then eastward some twelve miles toward an island that was little frequented, the last of the chain on this horn of the crescent, one came under the highest and boldest facade of cliffs that was to be found in all that group. It was here that Caius chanced to wander one calm mild day in early March, mild because the thermometer stood at less than 30 deg. below the freezing point, and a light vault of pearly cloud shut in the earth from the heaven, and seemed, by way of contrast with other days, to keep it warm. He had ridden far, following out of aimless curiosity the track that had been beaten on the side of the bay to this farthest island. It was a new road for him; he had never attempted it before; and no sooner had he got within good sight of the land, than his interest was wholly attracted by the cliffs, which, shelving somewhat outward at the top, and having all their sides very steep and smooth, were, except for a few crevices of ice, or an outward hanging icicle, or here and there a fringe of icicles, entirely free from snow and ice. He rode up under them wonderingly, pleased to feast his eyes upon the natural colour of rock and earth, and eager, with what knowledge of geology he had, to read the story they told.

This story, as far as the history of the earth was concerned, was soon told; the cliffs were of gray carboniferous limestone. Caius became interested in the beauty of their colouring. Blue and red clay had washed down upon them in streaks and patches; where certain faults in the rock occurred, and bars of iron-yielding stone were seen, the rust had washed down also, so that upon flat facets and concave and convex surfaces a great variety of colour and tint, and light and shade, was produced.

He could not proceed immediately at the base of the cliffs, for in their shelter the snow had drifted deep. He was soon obliged to keep to the beaten track, which here ran about a quarter of a mile distant from the rock. Walking his horse, and looking up as he went, his attention was arrested by perceiving that a whitish stain on a smooth dark facet of the rock assumed the appearance of a white angel in the act of alighting from aerial flight. The picture grew so distinct that he could not take his eyes from it, even after he had gone past, until he was quite weary of looking back or of trying to keep his restive horse from dancing forward. When, at last, however, he turned his eyes from the majestic figure with the white wings, his fancy caught at certain lines and patches of rust which portrayed a horse of gigantic size galloping upon a forward part of the cliff. The second picture brought him to a standstill, and he examined the whole face of the hill, realizing that he was in the presence of a picture-gallery which Nature, it seemed, had painted all for her own delight. He thought himself the discoverer; he felt at once both a loneliness and elation at finding himself in that frozen solitude, gazing with fascinated eyes at one portion of the rock after another where he saw, or fancied he saw, sketches of this and that which ravished his sense of beauty both in colour and form.

In his excitement to see what would come next, he did not check the stepping of his horse, but only kept it to a gentle pace. Thus he came where the road turned round with the rounding cliff, and here for a bit he saw no picture upon the rock; but still he looked intently, hoping that the panorama was not ended, and only just noticed that there was another horse beside his own within the lonely scene. In some places here the snow was drifted high near the track; in others, both the road and the adjoining tracts of ice were swept by the wind almost bare of snow. He soon became aware that the horse he had espied was not upon the road. Then, aroused to curiosity, he turned out of his path and rode through shallow snow till he came close to it.

The horse was standing quite still, and its rider was standing beside it, one arm embracing its neck, and with head leaning back against the creature's glossy shoulder. The person thus standing was Madame Le Maitre, and she was looking up steadfastly at the cliffs, of which this point in the road displayed a new expanse.

So silently had the horse of Caius moved in the muffling snow that, coming up on the other side, he was able to look at the lady for one full moment before she saw him, and in that moment and the next he saw that the sight of him robbed her face of the peace which had been written there. She was wrapped as usual in her fur-lined cloak and hood. She looked to him inquiringly, with perhaps just a touch of indignant displeasure in her expression, waiting for him to explain, as if he had come on purpose to interrupt her.

"I am sorry. I had no idea you were here, or I would not have come."

The next moment he marvelled at himself as to how he had known that this was the right thing to say; for it did not sound polite.

Her displeasure was appeased.

"You have found my pictures, then," she said simply.

"Only this hour, and by chance."

By this time he was wondering by what road she had got there. If she had ridden alone across the bay from Harbour Island, where the Pembrokes lived, she had done a bold thing for a woman, and one, moreover, which, in the state of health in which he had seen her last, would have been impossible to her.

Madame Le Maitre had begun to move slowly, as one who wakes from a happy dream. He perceived that she was making preparations to mount.

"I cannot understand it," he cried; "how can these pictures come just by chance? I have heard of the Picture Rocks on Lake Superior, for instance, but I never conceived of anything so distinct, so lovely, as these that I have seen."

"The angels make them," said Madame Le Maitre. She paused again (though her bridle had been gathered in her hand ready for the mount), and looked up again at the rock.

Caius was not unheedful of the force of that soft but absolute assertion, but he must needs speak, if he spoke at all, from his own point of view, not hers.

"I suppose," he said, "that the truth is there is something upon the rock that strikes us as a resemblance, and our imagination furnishes the detail that perfects the picture."

"In that case would you not see one thing and I another?"

Now for the first time his eyes followed hers, and on the gray rock immediately opposite he suddenly perceived a picture, without definite edge it is true, but in composition more complete than anything he had seen before. What had formerly delighted him had been, as it were, mere sketches of one thing or another scattered in different places, but here there was a large group of figures, painted for the most part in varied tints of gray, and blue, and pink.

In the foreground of this picture a young man and young woman, radiant both in face and apparel, stood before a figure draped in priestly garments of sober gray. Behind them, in a vista, which seemed to be filled with an atmosphere of light and joy, a band of figures were dancing in gay procession, every line of the limbs and of the light draperies suggesting motion and glee. How did he know that some of these were men, and some were women? He had never seen such dresses as they wore, which seemed to be composed of tunics and gossamer veils of blue and red. Yet he did know quite distinctly which were men and which were women, and he knew that it was a marriage scene. The bride wore a wreath of flowers; the bridegroom carried a sheaf or garland of fruit or grain, which seemed to be a part of the ceremony. Caius thought he was about to offer it to the priest.

For some minutes the two looked up at the rock quite silently. Now the lady answered his last remark:

"What is it you see?"

"You know it best; tell me what it is."

"It is a wedding. Don't you see the wedding dance?"

He had not got down from his horse; he had a feeling that if he had alighted she would have mounted. He tried now, leaning forward, to tell her how clearly he had seen the meaning, if so it might be called, of the natural fresco, and to find some words adequately to express his appreciation of its beauty. He knew that he had not expressed himself well, but she did not seem dissatisfied at the tribute he paid to a thing which she evidently regarded with personal love.

"Do you think," she said, "that it will alter soon, or become defaced? It has been just the same for a year. It might, you know, become defaced any day, and then no one would have seen it but ourselves. The islanders, you know, do not notice it."

"Ah, yes," said Caius; "beauty is made up of two parts—the objects seen and the understanding eye. We only know how much we are indebted to training and education when we find out to what extent the natural eye is blind."

This remark did not seem to interest her. He felt that it jarred somehow, and that she was wishing him away.

"But why," he asked, "should angels paint a marriage? They neither marry——" He stopped, feeling that she might think him flippant if he quoted the text.

"Because it is the best thing to paint," she said.

"How the best?"

"Well, just the best human thing: everyone knows that."

"Has her marriage been so gloriously happy?" said Caius to himself as the soft assurance of her tones reached his ears, and for some reason or other he felt desolate, as a soul might upon whom the door of paradise swung shut. Then irritably he said: "I don't know it. Most marriages seem to me——" He stopped, but she had understood.

"But if this picture crumbles to pieces, that does not alter the fact that the angels made it lovely." (Her slight accent, because it made the pronunciation of each word more careful, gave her speech a quaint suggestion of instruction that perhaps she did not intend.) "The idea is painted on our hearts in just the same way; it is the best thing we can think of, except God."

"Yet," urged Caius, "even if it is the best from our point of view, you will allow that it is written that it is not a heavenly institution. The angels should try to teach us to look at something higher."

"The words do not mean that. I don't believe there is anything higher for us. I don't believe people are not married in heaven."

With sweet unreason she set aside authority when it clashed with her opinion. To Caius she had never been so attractive as now, when, for the first time to him, she was proving herself of kin to ordinary folk; and yet, so curiously false are our notions of sainthood that she seemed to him the less devout because she proved to be more loving.

"You see"—she spoke and paused—"you see, when I was at school in a convent I had a friend. I was perfectly happy when I was with her and she with me; it was a marriage. When we went in the garden or on the sea, we were only happy when we were with each other. That is how I learned early that it is only perfect to be two. Ah, when one knows what it is to be lonely, one learns that that is true; but many people are not given grace to be lonely—they are sufficient to themselves. They say it is enough to worship God; it is a lie. He cannot be pleased; it is selfish even to be content to worship God alone."

"The kind of marriage you think of, that perhaps may be made in heaven." Caius was feeling again that she was remote from him, and yet the hint of passionate loneliness in tone and words remained a new revelation of her life. "Is not religion enough?" He asked this only out of curiosity.

"It is not true religion if we are content to be alone with God; it is not the religion of the holy Christ; it is a fancy, a delusion, a mistake. Have you not read about St. John? Ah, I do not say that it is not often right to live alone, just as it may be right to be ill or starving. That is because the world has gone wrong; and to be content, it is to blaspheme; it is like saying that what is wrong is God's ideal for us, and will last for ever."