I must say here for the benefit of the drivelling, cantankerous critic, with a squint in his eye, who never looks for anything good in a piece of writing, but is always on the search for a flaw, that I send passages from Tennyson floating through my Marie’s brain with good justification.  She had received a very fair education at a convent in Red River.  She could speak and write both French and English with tolerable accuracy; and she could with her supple, tawny little fingers, produce a nice sketch of a prairie tree-clump, upon a sheet of cartridge paper, or a piece of birch rind.

Young Scott was all the while growing more serious, and even becoming pathetic, which is a sign of something very delicious, and not uncommon, when you are travelling under a bewitching moon, in company with a more bewitching maiden.

“I wish I could be with you during the early part of your stay here, for I could do much toward reconciling you to your new life.”

“And are you not going to stay with us?” Her voice sounded somewhat like a restrained cry of pain.

“No Marie, my child, I have to return to the territories.”

“But that wicked man will work his vengeance upon you.”

“It is just to meet that wicked man upon his own ground that I go back.  It is to thwart him, to cast in my strength on the side of peace, in the interest of those fertile plains, that I return.  You do not suppose that this licentious fanatic can ultimately prevail against the will of the people of Canada, against the military force of the Empire of Great Britain.  The sovereign of our mighty realm tolerates in no land any dispute of her authority, and this mad uprising will be crushed as I might stamp put the feeble splutter of a bed-room taper.  There are without the intervention of outside force at all, enough of brave and loyal whitemen to overthrow this scurvy miscreant; and my immediate task is to do the little that lies in my power to incite them to their duty.  When my work is done, when the plains are cleared of the mutinous, blind, unreasoning hordes whom this cunning, vainglorious upstart has called away from their peaceful homesteads, I will return, my darling little girl, with the tidings; and I shall bring you back to the spot where you grew up pure and artless as the lily that brightens the pond upon which we have so often paddled our birch together.  What the days after that may have in store for us I know not.”

“Ah, I shall be very dreary in your absence, Monsieur Scott.”

“And I, my dear girl, shall be not less dreary without you.  I believe you have regarded yourself as a mere plaything in my eyes.  Why, ma chere, all of my heart you have wholly and irrevocably.  One of your dear hands is more precious, more sacred to me, than any other girl whom mine eyes have ever seen.  Do you remember the definition of love that I tried to give you?  Well, I gave it from my own experience.  With such a love, my prairie