She laughed, happy and trembling, her lips held up to him.
"I didn't please you to-day," she whispered. "I will never do up my hair again!"
He kissed her, and his arms dropped from her shoulders.
"Never, never again—until you have forgotten to love me," she repeated. "Good night, Brother Jan!"
Across the open, through the thinned edge of the black spruce, deeper and deeper into the cold, unquivering lifelessness of the forest, Jan went from the door that closed between him and Mélisse, her last words still whispering in his ears, the warm touch of her hair on his cheeks—and the knowledge of what this day had meant for him swiftly surging upon him, bringing with it a torment which racked him to the soul.
Fifteen years ago! He stopped and looked up, the starlight whitening his face. There was no change in this night from that other one of ages and ages ago. There were the same stars, like fierce eyes of pale fire, robbed of softness by the polar cold; there were the same cloudless blue space, the same hissing flashes of the aurora leaping through its infinity, the same trees that had listened to his moaning prayers on that night when he had staggered into Lac Bain.
He went on until he came to where the beaten trail swept up and away from a swamp. As vividly as if it had happened but yesterday, he remembered how he had dragged himself through this swamp, bleeding and starving, his violin clutched to his breast, guided by the barking of dogs, which seemed to come from a million miles away. He plunged into it now, picking his tangled way until he stood upon a giant ridge, from which he looked out through the white night into the limitless barrens to the north.
Along the edge of those barrens he had come, daring the hundred deaths between hunter's cabin and Indian wigwam, starving at times, almost dying of cold, building fires to keep the wolves back, and playing—always playing to keep up his courage, until he found Mélisse. Fifteen years had passed since then, and the cumulative force of the things that had grown out of those years had fallen upon him this day. He had felt it first when Mélisse turned upon him at the foot of the mountain; and after that in the cabin, in every breath he drew, in every look that he gave her. For him she had changed for all time. She was no longer the little Mélisse, his sister. And yet—
He was almost saying her last words aloud:
"Good night, Brother Jan!"