All
the seed, the best seed-grain, I am going to buy at Roberval,
settling for it on the spot ... I have the money put aside; I
shall pay cash, without running into debt to a soul, and if only we
have an average season there will be a fine crop to harvest. Just
think of it, Maria, a hundred and thirty bushels of good seed in
first-rate land! And in the summer before the hay-making, and then
again before the harvest, will be the best chance for building a
nice tight warm little house, all of tamarack. I have the wood
ready, cut and piled behind my barn; my brother will help me,
perhaps Esdras and Da'Be as well, when they get home. Next winter I
shall go to the shanties, taking a horse with me, and in the spring
I shall bring back not less than two hundred dollars in my pocket.
Then, should you be willing to wait so long for me, would be the
time ..."

Maria was leaning against the door, a hand still upon the latch, her
eyes turned away. Eutrope Gagnon had just this and no more to offer
her: after a year of waiting that she should become his wife, and
live as now she was doing in another wooden house on another
half-cleared farm ... Should do the household work and the
cooking, milk the cows, clean the stable when her man was
away--labour in the fields perhaps, since she was strong and there
would be but two of them ... Should spend her evenings at the
spinning-wheel or in patching old clothes ... Now arid then in
summer resting for half an hour, seated on the door-step, looking
across their scant fields girt by the measureless frowning woods; or
in winter thawing a little patch with her breath on the windowpane,
dulled with frost, to watch the snow falling on the wintry earth and
the forest ... The forest ... Always the inscrutable, inimical
forest, with a host of dark things hiding there--closed round them
with a savage grip that must be loosened little by little, year by
year; a few acres won each spring and autumn as the years pass,
throughout all the long days of a dull harsh life ... No, that she
could not face ...

"I know well enough that we shall have to work hard at first,"
Eutrope went on, "but you have courage, Maria, and are well used to
labour, as I am. I have always worked hard; no one can say that I
was ever lazy, and if only you will marry me it will be my joy to
toil like an ox all the day long to make a thriving place of it, so
that we shall be in comfort before old age comes upon us. I do not
tou