f they were glad to be
part of it.

"Pani, do you suppose we could go ever so far down and build a tent or a
hut and live there all the rest of the summer?"

"But I thought you liked the woods!"

"I like being far away. I am tired of Detroit."

"Mam'selle, it would hardly be safe. There are still unfriendly Indians.
And--the loneliness of it! For there are some evil spirits about, though
Holy Church has banished them from the town."

Occasionally her old beliefs and fears rushed over the Indian woman and
shook her in a clutch of terror. She felt safest in her own little nest,
under the shadow of the Citadel, with the high, sharp palisades about
her, when night came on.

"Art thou afraid of Madame De Ber?" she asked, hesitatingly. "For of a
truth she did not want you for her son's wife."

"I know it. Pierre made them all agree to it. I am sorry for Pierre, and
yet he has the blindness of a mole. I am not the kind of wife he wants.
For though there is so much kissing and caressing at first, there are
dinners and suppers, and the man is cross sometimes because other things
go wrong. And he smells of the skins and oils and paints, and the dirt,
too," laughing. "Faugh! I could not endure it. I would rather dwell in
the woods all my life. Why, I should come to hate such a man! I should
run away or kill myself. And that would be a bitter self-punishment, for
I love so to live if I can have my own life. Pani, why do men want one
particular woman? Susette is blithe and merry, and Angelique is pretty
as a flower, and when she spins she makes a picture like one the
schoolmaster told me about. Oh, yes, there are plenty of girls who would
be proud and glad to keep Pierre's house. Why does not the good God give
men the right sense of things?"

Pani turned her head mournfully from side to side, and the shrunken lips
made no reply.

Then they glided on and on. The blue, sunlit arch overhead, the waving
trees that sent dancing shadows like troops of elfin sprites over the
water, the fret in one place where a rock broke the murmurous lapping,
the swish somewhere else, where grasses and weeds and water blooms
rooted in the sedge rocked back and forth with the slow tide--how
peaceful it all was!

Yet Jeanne Angelot was not at peace. Why, when the woods or the river
always soothed her? And it was not Pierre who disturbed the current, who
lay at the bottom like some evil spirit, reaching up long, cruel arms to
grasp her. Last su