nceforth must she forget that once it had
shone upon her path, and grope through the dark with faltering
steps.

Chapdelaine and Tit'Be were smoking in silence by the stove; the
mother knitted stockings; Chien, stretched out with his head between
his paws, blinked sleepily in enjoyment of the good warmth.
Telesphore had dozed off with the catechism open on his knees, and
the little Alma Rose, not yet in bed, was hovering in doubt between
the wish to draw attention to her brother's indolence, and a sense
of shame at thus betraying him.

Maria looked down again, took her work in hand, and her simple mind
pursued a little further its puzzling train of thought. When a girl
does not feel, or feels no longer, that deep mysterious impulse
toward a man singled out from all the rest of the world, what is
left to guide her? For what things should she seek in her marriage?
For a satisfying life, surely; to make a happy home for herself ...

Her parents would like her to marry Eutrope Gagnon--that she
felt--because she would live near them, and again because this life
upon the land was the only one they knew, and they naturally thought
it better than any other. Eutrope was a fine fellow, hard-working
and of kindly disposition, and he loved her; but Lorenzo Surprenant
also loved her; he, likewise, was steady and a good worker; he was a
Canadian at heart, not less than those amongst whom she lived; he
went to church ... And he offered as his splendid gift a world
dazzling to the eye, all the wonders of the city. He would rescue
her from this oppression of frozen earth and gloomy forest.

She could not as yet resolve to say to herself: "I will marry
Lorenzo Surprenant," but her heart had made its choice. The cruel
north-west wind that heaped the snow above Francois Paradis at the
foot of some desolate cypress bore also to her on its wings the
frown and the harshness of the country wherein she dwelt, and filled
her with hate of the northern winter, the cold, the whitened ground
and the loneliness, of that boundless forest unheedful of the
destinies of men where every melancholy tree is fit to stand in a
home of the dead. Love--all-compelling love--for a brief space had
dwelt within her heart ... Mighty flame, scorching and bright,
quenched now, and never to revive. It left her spirit empty and
yearning; she was fain to seek forgetfulness and cure in that life
afar, among the myriad paler lights of the city.

CHAPTER XIV

I