row, "C'est le bon Dieu!"--always "C'est le bon Dieu!"

In some sense it was a pity that she had brains above the ordinary, that
she had had a good education and nice tastes. It was the cultivation of
the primitive and idealistic mind, which could not rationalise a sense
of romance, of the altruistic, by knowledge of life. As she sat behind
the post-office counter she read all sorts of books that came her way.
When she learned English so as to read it almost as easily as she read
French, her greatest joy was to pore over Shakespeare, with a heart full
of wonder, and, very often, eyes full of tears--so near to the eyes of
her race. Her imagination inhabited Chaudiere with a different folk,
living in homes very unlike these wide, sweeping-roofed structures, with
double windows and clean-scrubbed steps, tall doors, and wide, uncovered
stoops. Her people--people of bright dreaming--were not quarrelsome,
or childish, or merely traditional, like the habitants. They were
picturesque and able and simple, doing good things in disguise,
succouring distress, yielding their lives without thought for a cause,
or a woman, and loving with an undying love.

Charley was of these people--from the first instant she saw him. The
Cure, the Avocat, and the Seigneur were also of them, but placidly,
unimportantly. "The Sick Man at Jo Portugais' House" came out of a
mysterious distance. Something in his eyes said, "I have seen, I have
known," told her that when he spoke she would answer freely, that they
were kinsfolk in some hidden way. Her nature was open and frank; she
lived upon the house-tops, as it were, going in and out of the lives of
the people of Chaudiere with neighbourly sympathy and understanding. Yet
she knew that she was not of them, and they knew that, poor as she was,
in her veins flowed the blood of the old nobility of France. For this
the Cure could vouch. Her official position made her the servant of the
public, and she did her duty with naturalness.

She had been a figure in the parish ever since the day she returned from
the convent at Quebec, and took her dead mother's place in the home and
the parish. She had a quick temper, but there was not a cheerless note
in her nature, and there was scarce a dog or a horse in the parish but
knew her touch, and responded to it. Squirrels ate out of her hand, she
had even tamed two partridges, and she kept in her little garden a bear
she had brought up from a cub. Her devotion to her