Ah, dear God!  How happy had been the early days of this awaiting!  As week followed week something quickened in her heart and shot upward, like a rich and beauteous sheaf whose opening ears bend low under their weight.  Happiness beyond any dream came dancing to her ...  No, it was stronger and keener yet, this joy of hers.  It had been a great light shining in the twilight of a lonely land, a beacon toward which one journeys, forgetful of the tears that were about to flow, saying with glad defiance:  “I knew it well—­knew that somewhere on the earth was such a thing as this ...”  It was over.  Yes, the gleam was gone.  Henceforth 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.