And then she fled from him, and he sat up late into the night, thinking.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE SCARS OF SLAVERY
And from the gloomy caves of Mem'ry came
The bandits of Repentance in the night
And left her naked, and in spirit torn.
John Hartley, "Street Dust."
Every Klondike of achievement has its Chilkoot of adversity.—"The Silver Poppy."
The next afternoon they were on the Grand Battery, leaning against one of the obsolete old mortars that frowned down over the river. A calm sky of robin's-egg blue stretched over them. Golden and quiet as were the Laurentides about them, there was a touch of chilliness in that clear, northern air, a muffled coldness which Hartley likened to a naked saber-blade buried in rose-leaves. The wide St. Lawrence lay beneath them like a pool of silver. In the remoter distance stretched the blue and purple foot-hills of the Laurentians themselves.
Miles beneath them they could see the valleys of gloomy greenness, dotted with their little flashing whitewashed habitant houses, and over everything the mellow, autumnal sunlight lay; over the gray walls of the Citadel, burning like fire on the windows and spires, gemming the long hillside sloping down to the river, making opals and pearls of the little sails and softening the very grimness of the dark and more distant headlands frowning so sternly out over the peaceful water.