I thought of this, in an incoherent, muddy way, as the
step came nearer. And I worked with hurrying hands at the canoe.
Then came a voice. No whispering, no rustling, nothing vague and
formless and haunting, but a low, commanding call:--
"Bonjour, mon ami."
I did not start. If I turned slowly it was because I knew what was
waiting me, and was adjusting several possibilities to meet it. It was
a man's voice that called, yet its every inflection was familiar,
familiar as the beating of my heart. For madame, my wife, had called
to me more or less often in the twin of that voice with its slurring
deliberateness and its insolent disregard of the pitfall accents of a
foreign tongue. And now I turned to meet her cousin, the man whom she
had promised to marry; the man who had deserted her to the knives of
savages; the man whom she despised and yet feared, and who now called
to me in a voice that was hers and yet was not; that haunted and
repelled, all in one. I did not think out any of this by rule and
line. I only knew that I dreaded meeting this man who was stepping,
stepping into my life through the fog, and that I turned to meet him
with my heart like ice but my brain on fire.
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