“I am one whom very few wholly comprehend, I fear, and surely not upon first acquaintance,” she answered thoughtfully, “for I am full of strange moods, and perhaps dream more than other girls.  This may have been born of my early convent training, and the mystic tales of the nuns; nor has it been lessened by the loneliness of the frontier.  So, if I differ from other young women, you may know ’t is my training, as well as my nature, that may account for it.  I have led a strange life, Monsieur, and one that has known much of sadness.  There are times when I seek my own thoughts, and find liking for no other company.  Then I come here, and in some way the loneliness of water and plain soothe me as human speech cannot.  I used to love to stand yonder by the eastern wall and gaze out over the Great Lake, watching the green surges chase each other until they burst in spray along the beach.  But since I went adrift in the little boat, and felt the cruelty of the water, I have shrunk from looking out upon it.  Monsieur, have you never known how restful it sometimes is to be alone?”

“My life has mostly been a solitary one,” I answered, responding unconsciously to her mood, and, in doing so, forgetting my embarrassment.  “It is the birthright of all children of the frontier.  Indeed, I have seen so little of the great world and so much of the woods, that I scarcely realize what companionship means, especially that of my own age.  I have made many a solitary camp leagues from the nearest settlement, and have tracked the forest alone for days together, so content with my own thought that possibly I understand your meaning better than if my life had been passed among crowds.”

“Ah! but I like the crowds,” she exclaimed hastily, “and the glow and excitement of that brighter, fuller life, where people really live.  It is so dull here,—­the same commonplace faces, the tiresome routine of drill, the same blue sky, gray water, and green plains, to look upon day after day.  Oh, but it is all so wearisome, and you cannot conceive how I have longed again for Montreal and the many little gaieties that brighten a woman’s world.  There are those here who have never known these happier things; their whole horizon of experience has been bounded by garrison palisades; but ’t is not so with me,—­I tasted of the sweet wine once, when I was a girl, and the memory never leaves me.”

“Yet you are often happy?”

“’T is my nature, Monsieur, a legacy of my mother’s people; but I am not always gay of heart when my lips smile.”

“And the coming of the French gallant has doubtless freshened your remembrance of the past?” I said, a trifle bitterly.

“It has indeed,” was her frank admission.  “He represents a life we know so little about here on the far frontier.  To you, with your code of border manliness, he may appear all affectation, mere shallow insincerity; but to me, Captain de Croix represents his class, stands for the refinements of social order to which women can never be indifferent.  Those were the happiest days of my life, Monsieur; and at Montreal he was only one among many.”