rude bower of saplings built above the door; and
soon when Odalie sat here beside her spinning-wheel, in her white linen
dress with its broad collar of her own hand-wrought lace, to enjoy the
cool air from the mountains, and the color of the red sunset on the
river, she had a canopy of vines above her head, and between her upward
glance and the sky, a blooming rose, faintly pink, and a bird's nest
with four blue eggs.

Captain Demere, coming in at the gate of the stockade one afternoon,
exclaimed in surprise and pleasure at the prettiness and the
completeness of this rude comfort. There was but one room in the house
with a floor; the seats were only puncheon benches with rough staves for
legs thrust through auger-holes and one or two of her befrilled
"tabourets"; the table was of like manufacture; the beds and pillows
were mere sacks filled with dried balsam fringes from the great
fir-trees, and supported on the rudest frames; but the fresh aromatic
fragrance the fir dispensed, the snow-white linen the couches displayed,
the flutter of the quaint bird-decorated curtains at the windows, the
array of the few bits of treasured old china, the shelf of precious old
books, the cluster of purple and white violets arranged in a great
opaline pearly mussel-shell from the river, in default of vase, in the
center of the wabbly table, the dainty freshness and neatness of the
whole--"This is _home_!" he declared. "I accept a new anthropological
dogma. Man is only the fort-builder--woman is the home-maker!"

"Yes," said Odalie in content and pride, surveying her treasures, as
she conducted him about the place, for he had not been here since the
completion of the improvements; "I often say that this is _home_!"

"But never in French," put in Hamish at her elbow.

Nevertheless, this did not contribute to alter Captain Demere's opinion
that the frontier was no place for women, though that would imply, with
his later conclusions, no place for home. He went away wearing in his
buttonhole a sprig of sweetbrier, which he declared again reminded him
so of home. He had not thought to find it here, and memory fell upon him
unprepared and at a disadvantage. The moon was up when he stepped into
his boat, and the orderly, bending to the oars, shot straight out into
the river. Long, burnished white lines lay upon its gleaming surface,
and looking back Demere could see beyond the shadow and sheen of the
sloping bank the cleared space, where the