was
no life in it.

But the colder it grew the higher Grignon's log fires mounted. And when
channels were cut in the snow both along the ridge above Green Bay, and
across country in every direction, French trains moved out with jangling
bells, and maids and men uttered voice sounds which spread as by miracle
on the diffusing air from horizon to horizon. You could hear the
officers speaking across the river; and dogs were like to shake the sky
down with their barking. Echoes from the smallest noises were born in
that magnified, glaring world.

The whole festive winter spun past. Marie and Katarina brought young men
to the peaks of hope in the "twosing" seat, and plunged them down to
despair, quite in the American fashion. Christmas and New Year's days
were great festivals, when the settlement ate and drank at Pierre
Grignon's expense, and made him glad as if he fathered the whole post.
Madame Grignon spun and looked to the house. And a thousand changes
passed over the landscape. But in all that time no one could see any
change in my Cloud-Mother. She sewed like a child. She laughed, and
danced gavottes. She trod the snow, or muffled in robes, with Madame
Ursule and the girls, flew over it in a French train; a sliding box with
two or three horses hitched tandem. Every evening I sat by her side at
the fire, while she made little coats and trousers for me. But
remembrance never came into her eyes. The cloud stood round about her as
it did when I first tried to penetrate it.

My own dim days were often in mind. I tried to recall sensations. But I
had lived a purely physical life. Her blunders of judgment and delusion
of bodily shrinking were no part of my experience. The thinking self in
me had been paralyzed. While the thinking self in her was alive, in a
cloud. Both of us were memoryless, excepting her recollection of Paul.

After March sent the ice out of river and bay, spring came with a rush
as it comes in the north. Perhaps many days it was silently rising from
tree roots. In February we used to say:--"This air is like spring." But
after such bold speech the arctic region descended upon us again, and we
were snowed in to the ears. Yet when the end of March unlocked us, it
seemed we must wait for the month of Mary to give us soft air and blue
water. Then suddenly it was spring, and every living soul knew it. Life
revived with passion. Longings which you had forgotten came and took you
by the throat, saying, "You sh