"I must take you home," he whispered.
They hurried through the gloom, hand in hand. In half an hour they had reached the cliff trail that led to Five Fingers, and here Mona insisted that Peter turn back, while she went on alone. She was glad Pierre and Josette were at Joe's house when she came to the settlement. She called good night to them through the open door, and went to her room, with the excuse that she was tired.
She sat down at her window, and watched the moon come up. Later she heard Pierre and Josette when they returned. And after that, one after another, the lights went out in Five Fingers until the cabins lay like great shadows in the slumbering stillness. In this stillness she heard the clock in her bedroom tick off every second of the hours.
Until now she had never believed that answered prayer could bring with it a grimness and torture of tragedy like that which had descended upon her life and Peter's. Passionately she sobbed out her hatred for Aleck Curry, the monster who at last had descended upon them with his vengeance.
As the hours dragged on she found herself fighting more and more desperately against the desire to steal quietly from her room, tiptoe down the stairs and go to Simon McQuarrie's cabin that she might confide in him all that had happened that afternoon. Only Peter's warning to keep their secret locked tightly in her own breast held her back. Yet in Simon rested her last hope, for from the first day Peter had come into the old Scotchman's life he had found home—and a protection and love which in Mona's thoughts made him almost of Simon's flesh and blood. The impulse to go to him—to be false to Peter for the first time in her life—was a torment in her brain, and where one little voice had urged her at first, a hundred added to their insistence now. Slowly the revolt became a conviction that it was right and reasonable she should go to Simon, in spite of her promise to Peter.
Quietly she opened the door to her room and went down the stairs, making no sound to disturb Pierre and Josette Gourdon. A slim, pale figure, she crossed the clearing and paused in the shadow of the cabin where the Scotchman lived. Instinctively she looked up at Peter's window even though she knew he was in the forest with his father. Then she knocked on the door. Her heart throbbed as she listened for a response inside. It seemed to beat loudly, as if crying out against her faithlessness in breaking a promise to Peter. She knocked again, and in a moment she could hear McQuarrie moving. She counted his slow footsteps as they came across the floor. Then the door opened, and his tall, gaunt figure stood above her, swathed in a nightgown that fell to the toes of his feet. At any other time Mona would have laughed at the grotesqueness of his appearance as he stared down into her white face, with a nightcap on the back of his head.
He reached out a hand. "Ange!" he gasped. "You! What is the matter?"
She slipped past him and closed the door.
"Please light a lamp," she said. "Please——"
Simon struck a match. The flare of it illumined his face, tense and set in its amazement. When the lamp was lighted he took down a coat from a peg in the wall and put it on. Then he turned to Mona again. She stood before him with her hands clasped at her breast, and in her dark eyes was a look that alarmed him. And he could see in her bare throat the little heart-beating throb that always came when she was stirred by deep emotion.