blow the roof off something if I have to stay here much longer. And you'll love the Indian babies, mother mine. I'll steal one in a moss-bag for you. Mrs. Grange has got so many that she'd never miss two or three."
She mentioned Moosta's name easily, but she could not speak of Andree. Her mother could neither help nor understand there. She could not be expected to. For Jennifer's own need she had found the solution to the thing which had troubled her. Dick had redeemed Tempest at the cost of some dishonour to himself, and possibly some well-deserved shame, and he had been man enough not to ask forgiveness where it was not likely to be accorded. But, because Grange's Andree was also a woman who loved him and who could never come near him in life, Jennifer felt a thrill of joy and thankfulness that it should be for her to give comfort here and to untie the threads that Dick's careless hands had knotted.
She dreamed that night of the ways whereby that life which the great North was absorbing should cross tracks with her own again. The stray word of a breed who had passed him on the rivers. Indians coming in with the winter furs, who knew the trails he went. A factor, or a missionary, perhaps, at whose house he had stayed. Letters brought by the steamer and written long months before. The wide brooding majesty of the North closed round her, and those long, calm days on the Athabaska were clear to Jennifer as she fell asleep; and in place of the rattling cars she heard again the water parting at the prow, and instead of the flaring light across the street she saw the moon-reflection, deep and serene and glorious, in the bosom of the drowsing river.
Three telegrams and two letters secured the old house on the Lake to Jennifer again, and in the midst of her packing came another letter from Slicker, written from Saskatoon. He enclosed, for Jennifer's benefit, young Forbes' description of the leaving of the Long Patrol from Grey Wolf and Grange's Andree's part in the matter.
"I guess it was a pretty shady thing for Dick to chuck her away as he did," commented Slicker. "Of course, Andree is the limit, all right. But it must have been a shindy, as you'll see from what Lin Forbes says.
