Quietly Mona went out to meet Peter. "He is sleeping," she said, as Peter's arm closed about her in the thickening darkness. "If he can only pass the night that way he will be strong and well again in the morning." Yet her voice trembled as she tried to bring him comfort. "Aleck is safe?" she whispered. "He is on the island?"

"Yes, he is safe for tonight—and maybe for a number of days. After that——"

He stopped, not knowing how to finish, and Mona's soft hand caressed his cheek. "We will tell Simon, and Uncle Pierre, and Father Albanel," she suggested. "Surely they will know how to help us!"

"I've been thinking about that," he said slowly, with his lips against her hair. "You must promise me not to tell them, Mona. I think it is necessary. At least they must not know until tomorrow or the next day. Will you remember that?"

"You are sure it is best?"

"I believe so."

"Then I will remember."

They drew near to the door of the cabin and[228] listened. Faintly they could hear Donald McRae's breath as he slept.

"I must take you home," he whispered.

They hurried through the gloom, hand in hand. In half an hour they had reached the cliff trail that led to Five Fingers, and here Mona insisted that Peter turn back, while she went on alone. She was glad Pierre and Josette were at Joe's house when she came to the settlement. She called good night to them through the open door, and went to her room, with the excuse that she was tired.

She sat down at her window, and watched the moon come up. Later she heard Pierre and Josette when they returned. And after that, one after another, the lights went out in Five Fingers until the cabins lay like great shadows in the slumbering stillness. In this stillness she heard the clock in her bedroom tick off every second of the hours.

Until now she had never believed that answered prayer could bring with it a grimness and torture of tragedy like that which had descended upon her life and Peter's. Passionately she sobbed out her hatred for Aleck Curry, the monster who at last had descended upon them with his vengeance.

As the hours dragged on she found herself fighting more and more desperately against the desire to steal quietly from her room, tiptoe down the stairs and go to Simon McQuarrie's cabin that she might confide in him all that had happened that afternoon. Only[229] Peter's warning to keep their secret locked tightly in her own breast held her back. Yet in Simon rested her last hope, for from the first day Peter had come into the old Scotchman's life he had found home—and a protection and love which in Mona's thoughts made him almost of Simon's flesh and blood. The impulse to go to him—to be false to Peter for the first time in her life—was a torment in her brain, and where one little voice had urged her at first, a hundred added to their insistence now. Slowly the revolt became a conviction that it was right and reasonable she should go to Simon, in spite of her promise to Peter.

Quietly she opened the door to her room and went down the stairs, making no sound to disturb Pierre and Josette Gourdon. A slim, pale figure, she crossed the clearing and paused in the shadow of the cabin where the Scotchman lived. Instinctively she looked up at Peter's window even though she knew he was in the forest with his father. Then she knocked on the door. Her heart throbbed as she listened for a response inside. It seemed to beat loudly, as if crying out against her faithlessness in breaking a promise to Peter. She knocked again, and in a moment she could hear McQuarrie moving. She counted his slow footsteps as they came across the floor. Then the door opened, and his tall, gaunt figure stood above her, swathed in a nightgown that fell to the toes of his feet. At any other time Mona would have laughed at the grotesqueness of his appearance as he stared[230] down into her white face, with a nightcap on the back of his head.

He reached out a hand. "Ange!" he gasped. "You! What is the matter?"

She slipped past him and closed the door.

"Please light a lamp," she said. "Please——"

Simon struck a match. The flare of it illumined his face, tense and set in its amazement. When the lamp was lighted he took down a coat from a peg in the wall and put it on. Then he turned to Mona again. She stood before him with her hands clasped at her breast, and in her dark eyes was a look that alarmed him. And he could see in her bare throat the little heart-beating throb that always came when she was stirred by deep emotion.

With a desperate little cry she caught his hand. "Something terrible has happened," she whispered. "Something—you should know. But I promised Peter. I promised him I would tell no one—not even you. But I've got to turn that promise into a lie. If I don't——" The words broke on her lips. And then: "Peter's father has come back. He is with Peter now in the cabin near the beaver pond!"

Simon McQuarrie stood back from her, his hands dropping slowly and limply to his sides. Then he raised one of them as if to brush a shadow from his forehead, and his nightcap fell to the floor. "Donald McRae—has come back!" he repeated, and the deep lines in his face softened as Mona looked at him, and[231] joy trembled in his voice when he spoke. "Thank God, Ange! Why do you think it is so terrible? We have waited and hoped for a long time——" He stopped. What he saw in her face and eyes swept a sudden change into his own, and he caught her arm as the gladness died on his lips. "Has anything happened?" he demanded. "Has anything happened—to Peter—or to Donald McRae?"

She began telling him in a low voice, while Simon stared at her with his big hands reaching out as if to grip at something in the space between them.

"I was at the beaver pond when Peter's father staggered out of the willows and almost fell at my feet. I didn't know who the man was, but he was sick and tired and starving—so hungry he ate carrots I had meant for the beavers. I gave him our lunch, and while he was eating I learned he was Peter's father. It made me happy. Peter was coming to join me, and I told Donald McRae. He begged me not to let Peter know he was there. He wanted to hide in the bushes, and look at him without being seen, and then go away again. He said that was why he had come back—just to get a look at his boy. He told me the police were after him again, that they were driving him like a rat from hole to hole, and that his presence could only bring unhappiness and tragedy to Peter. So he hid in the willows, and Peter came."

"And then?"

"In the end Peter's father staggered out of the[232] bushes, and I left them together. Peter called me a little later and I ran back. Donald McRae was on the ground and at first I thought he was dead. Not until then did I realize how terribly sick and weak he was. We were on our knees beside him when he looked up, and there—there—grinning down at us—was the man Peter's father had been running away from. Oh, he was terrible—big and sweaty and leering down at us, almost laughing in his triumph, and—Simon—Simon—it was Aleck Curry!"

Her despair broke in a sobbing cry, and now the bones of Simon's great hands made a snapping sound as he clenched them, and his thin, hard face was gray in the glow of the lamp. "What happened then, Mona?"

"When Aleck went to put the manacles on Peter's father there was a fight—a terrible fight—and Aleck tried to kill Peter with a gun. He shot twice. I helped with a stone, and at last Peter got him into the pond, and almost drowned him. His father was still unconscious when we carried him to the cabin. Then Peter took Aleck down to his boat and to the little rock island two miles out from the shore. He is there now—a prisoner. And—what will happen to Peter? What can the law do to him?"

Simon paced slowly back and forth across the floor. His face was a mask of iron. His long nightgown flapped about his feet, and again his big, hard hands hung limp and straight at his sides.

[233]

"If Aleck escapes from the island and arrests Peter, or reports the affair to headquarters, it means the penitentiary," he said as if speaking to himself rather than to Mona. "And that is what will happen—if Curry has his way. He hates Peter. He would like to see Donald McRae hung, and Peter in prison, and you——" A tigerish gleam was in his eyes as he faced her. "Why didn't Peter kill him when he had the chance?" he cried, as for a single moment his self-control broke its leash. "As a boy he was a brute and a bully, and as a man his soul is that of a monster—even though now he is a part of the law. He wanted you—always. I know it an............