Just before they came up he had fallen into that most dangerous of all states, a sleep among the snows—a dull, numb insensibility induced by the constrained posture, the long watching, the extreme cold. His child's wail aroused him. He opened his eyes, but his first thought was that he was dreaming, for as Arthur's lantern was turned slowly on the little group he saw in the golden hair from which the scarlet hood had fallen back, in the fair, delicately-chiselled face, in the dark, mournful eyes, so like his own, the little one he had deserted—Margaret's child. How had she come there? Gradually, as the film passed from his senses, he began to remember the events of the night, and the latter part of L'Estrange's strange confession flashed over his mind. While horror withheld Arthur from speaking, while the guide, whose movements were slower than his, was coming up to their assistance, a glimmering of the truth dawned upon Maurice's mind. His child had come out to seek this man, his enemy—his child was pouring out on her mother's betrayer the treasures of her young heart's affection. It smote him with a sudden pang.
But no answer came from the stricken man to the child's impassioned cries, and suddenly she raised her eyes. They met those of her father. She looked at him for a moment in silence, and involuntarily Maurice trembled. He was thinking of what might have been if the hand of God had not forestalled his.
In his first burst of anger against this man, the destroyer of his peace, the slanderer of her who was dearer to him than life, it had seemed no crime to avenge himself once and for ever of his enemy. But with the silence of that solemn night other thoughts had come. In the unlooked-for ending of their strife that evening God had rebuked him. "Vengeance is mine!" seemed to be crying in his ears. What was he, that he should arrogate to himself the functions that belong to the Divine? And say what one will, under any circumstances it is an awful thing—a thing that can never be forgotten or put away—to destroy human life.
Maurice Grey was neither weak nor sentimental, but that night as he hung over his enemy, tending as a brother might have done the man he had intended to destroy, he shuddered at the remembrance of what might have happened in the fever of his just indignation. And now, when the child—his child—looked up at him, her eyes large with fear for his enemy, asking him mutely for an account of this strangeness, Maurice was thankful that his answer might be no revelation of a tragedy that would have chilled her warm young blood and filled her with loathing of him—her father.
"Who has hurt mon père?" asked Laura.
"Little one," replied Maurice gravely, "he is ill; he will be better soon."
By this time Arthur was close beside them. He stumbled over something hard, stooped, and found a pistol at his feet.
"Don't touch it!" cried Maurice hastily; "it is loaded."
"Loaded!" repeated the young man slowly; "then—"
"Foolish boy!" replied Maurice with meaning. "I tell you this man was taken ill near my door. In the impossibility of getting assistance to move him, I have been watching him ever since his first seizure; but, for Goodness' sake, don't stand looking at us, or we shall die of cold out here! Get your burly friend to help you, and between you perhaps you may be able to carry this man as far as the chalet. As for myself, I am so cramped and numb that it will be all I can do to creep."