It was a glorious day, such as comes in its full beauty only in the far northern spring, where the air enters the lungs like sharp, warm wine, laden with the tang of spruce and balsam, and the sweetness of the bursting poplar-buds.
"It was mighty good of you to come up," Severn was saying to the doctor. "The company has always been the best friend I've ever had—except one—and that's why I've hung to it all these years, trailing the sledges first as a kid, you know, then trapping, running, and—oh, Lord!"
He stopped to cough, and the little black-frocked missioner, looking across at Weyman, saw him bite his lips.
"That cough hurts, but it's better," Severn apologized, smiling weakly. "Funny, ain't it, a man like me coming down with a cough? Why, I've slept in ice a thousand times, with snow for a pillow and the thermometer down to fifty. But this last winter it was cold, seventy or lower, an' I worked in it when I ought to have been inside, warming my toes. But, you see, I wanted to get the cabin built, an' things all cleared up about here, before SHE came. It's the cold that got me, wasn't it, doc?"
"That's it," said Weyman, rolling and lighting a cigarette. Then he laughed, as the sick man finished another coughing spell, and said:
"I never thought you'd have a love affair, Bucky!"
"Neither did I," chuckled Severn. "Ain't it a wonder, doc? Here I'm thirty-eight, with a hide on me like leather, an' no thought of a woman for twenty years, until I saw HER. I don't mean it's a wonder I fell in love, doc—you'd 'a' done that if you'd met her first. The wonder of it is that she fell in love with me." He laughed softly. "I'll bet Father Brochet'll go in a heap himself when he marries us! It's goin' to happen next month. Did you ever see her, father—Marie La Corne, over at the post on Split Lake?"
Severn dropped his head to cough, but Weyman say the sudden look of horror that leaped into the little priest's face.
"Marie La Corne!"
"Yes, at Split Lake."