"
"Who will kill him?" asked Fleda. "Dennis--he will kill Marchand if he
can."
The old man leaned forward with puzzled, gloomy interest. "Why? Dennis
left you for another. You say he had grown cold. Was that not what he
wanted--that you should leave him?"
The woman looked at him with tearful eyes. "If I had known Dennis better,
I should have waited. What he did is of the moment only. A man may fall
and rise again, but it is not so with a woman. She thinks and thinks upon
the scar that shows where she wounded herself; and she never forgets, and
so her life becomes nothing--nothing."
No one saw that Madame Bulteel held herself rigidly, and was so white
that even the sunlight was gold beside her look. Yet the strangest,
saddest smile played about her lips; and presently, as the eyes of the
others fastened on the woman and did not leave her, she regained her
usual composure.
The woman kept looking at Gabriel Druse. "When Dennis found that I had
gone, and knew why--for I left word on a sheet of paper--he went mad like
me. Trailing to the south, to find M'sieu' Marchand, he had an accident,
and was laid up in a shack for weeks on the Tanguishene River, and they
could not move him. But at last a ranchman wrote to me, and the letter
found me on the very day I left M'sieu'.
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