emotions.

"Eh, M'sieu?" she smiled, and McElroy, revived through all his being
with that smile, repeated his message.

She took her hands from the yellow meal and dusted them on a hempen
towel, and was ready to go forth beside him.

That short walk to the stockade gate was silent with the silence of
shy new joy, and once the factor glanced sidewise at the drooped lashes
above the dusky cheeks.

"Had you expected any messenger, Ma'amselle?" he asked indifferently as
they neared the portal with its fringe of peeping women and saw beyond
them the tall figure of the Bois-Brule, his lank hair banded back by a
red kerchief.

"Nay, M'sieu," replied the girl, and went forward to stand in the gate.

The messenger from the woods asked in good French if she were Maren Le
Moyne, and being answered in the affirmative, he took from his hunting
shirt a package wrapped in broad green leaves and placed it in her
hands.

The leaves were wilted with the heat of the man's body and came easily
off in her fingers, disclosing a small square box cunningly made from
birchbark and stained after the Indian fashion in brilliant colours. A
tiny lid was fastened with a thong of braided grass.

Wonderingly she slipped the little catch and lifted the cover.

Inside upon a bed of dampened moss there lay a wee red flower, the exact
counterpart of that one which Alfred de Courtenay had fastened in her
hair that morning by the well.

McElroy, at her shoulder, looked down upon it, and instantly the warmth
in his heart cooled.

When Maren looked up it was to find his eyes fixed on the messenger
whose tall figure swung away up the river's bank toward the north
forest, and they were coolly impersonal.

She was unversed in the ways of men where a maid is concerned, this
woman of the trail and portage, and she only knew vaguely that something
had gone wrong with sight of the little flower.

She stood, holding the box in her hand, among the women craning their
necks for a glimpse of the contents, and looked in open perplexity
at McElroy until a light laugh from the fringe behind her broke the
silence.

"A gift!" cried the little Francette, her childish voice full of a
concealed delight; "a gift from the forest; and where do such trinkets
come from save the lower branch of the Saskatchewan! It savours of our
pretty man of the long gold curls! Mon Dieu! The cavalier has made good
time!"

Whereat there was a stirring at the gate, and the peepi