She placed two chairs not far from the open door. They sat, and Pierre slowly rolled a cigarette and lighted it.
"How long have you lived here?" he asked presently.
"It is seven years since we came first," she replied. "After that night they said the place was haunted, and no one would live in it, but when my father died my mother and I came for three years. Then we went east, and again came back, and here we have been."
"The shutter?" Pierre asked.
They needed few explanations—their minds were moving with the same thought.
"I would not have it changed, and of course no one cared to touch it.
So it has hung there."
"As I placed it ten years ago," he said.
They both became silent for a time, and at last he said: "Marcey had no one,—Sergeant Laforce a mother."
"It killed his mother," she whispered, looking into the white sunlight. She was noting how it was flashed from the bark of the birch-trees near the Fort.
"His mother died," she added again, quietly. "It killed her—the gaol for him!"