My own dim days were often in mind.  I tried to recall sensations.  But I had lived a purely physical life.  Her blunders of judgment and delusion of bodily shrinking were no part of my experience.  The thinking self in me had been paralyzed.  While the thinking self in her was alive, in a cloud.  Both of us were memoryless, excepting her recollection of Paul.

After March sent the ice out of river and bay, spring came with a rush as it comes in the north.  Perhaps many days it was silently rising from tree roots.  In February we used to say:—­“This air is like spring.”  But after such bold speech the arctic region descended upon us again, and we were snowed in to the ears.  Yet when the end of March unlocked us, it seemed we must wait for the month of Mary to give us soft air and blue water.  Then suddenly it was spring, and every living soul knew it.  Life revived with passion.  Longings which you had forgotten came and took you by the throat, saying, “You shall no longer be satisfied with negative peace.  Rouse, and live!” Then flitting, exquisite, purple flaws struck across milk-opal water in the bay.  Fishing boats lifted themselves in mirage, sailing lightly above the water; and islands sat high, with a cushion of air under them.

The girls manifested increasing interest in what they called the Pigeon Roost settlement affair.  Madame Ursule had no doubt told them what I said.  They pitied my Cloud-Mother and me with the condescending pity of the very young, and unguardedly talked where they could be heard.

“Oh, she’ll come to her senses some time, and he’ll marry her of course,” was the conclusion they invariably reached; for the thing must turn out well to meet their approval.  How could they foresee what was to happen to people whose lives held such contrasts?

“Father Pierre says he’s nearly twenty-eight; I call him an old bachelor,” declared Katarina; “and she was a married woman.  They are really very old to be in love.”

“You don’t know what you’ll do when you are old,” said Marie.

“Ah, I dread it,” groaned Katarina.

“So do I.”

“But there is grandmother.  She doesn’t mind it.  And beaux never trouble her now.”

“No,” sighed the other.  “Beaux never trouble her now.”

Those spring days I was wild with restlessness.  Life revived to dare things.  We heard afterwards that about that time the meteor rushed once more across France.  Napoleon landed at a Mediterranean port, gathering force as he marched, swept Louis XVIII away like a cobweb in his path, and moved on to Waterloo.  The greatest Frenchman that ever lived fell ultimately as low as St. Helena, and the Bourbons sat again upon the throne.  But the changes of which I knew nothing affected me in the Illinois Territory.

Sometimes I waked at night and sat up in bed, hot with indignation at the injustice done me, which I could never prove, which I did not care to combat, yet which unreasonably waked the fighting spirit in me.  Our natures toss and change, expand or contract, influenced by invisible powers we know not why.