“Speak to her, then, for yourself.  I wish you would get married.”

“I never shall,” declared Jenieve.  “I have seen the folly of it.”

“You never have been young,” complained Mama Lalotte.  “You don’t know how a young person feels.

“I let you go to the dances,” argued Jenieve.  “You have as good a time as any woman on the island.  But old Michel Pensonneau,” she added sternly, “is not settling down to smoke his pipe for the remainder of his life on this doorstep.”

“Monsieur Pensonneau is not old.”

“Do you take up for him, Mama Lalotte, in spite of me?” In the girl’s rich brunette face the scarlet of the cheeks deepened.  “Am I not more to you than Michel Pensonneau or any other engage?  He is old; he is past forty.  Would I call him old if he were no more than twenty?”

“Every one cannot be only twenty and a young agent,” retorted her elder; and Jenieve’s ears and throat reddened, also.

“Have I not done my best for you and the boys?  Do you think it does not hurt me to be severe with you?”

Mama Lalotte flounced around on her stool, but made no reply.  She saw peeping and smiling at the edge of the door a neighbor’s face, that encouraged her insubordinations.  Its broad, good-natured upper lip thinly veiled with hairs, its fleshy eyelids and thick brows, expressed a strength which she had not, yet would gladly imitate.

“Jenieve Lalotte,” spoke the neighbor, “before you finish whipping your mother you had better run and whip the boys.  They are throwing their shoes in the lake.”

“Their shoes!” Jenieve cried, and she scarcely looked at Jean Bati’ McClure’s wife, but darted outdoors along the beach.

“Oh, children, have you lost your shoes?”

“No,” answered Toussaint, looking up with a countenance full of enjoyment.

“Where are they?”

“In the lake.”

“You didn’t throw your new shoes in the lake?”

“We took them for boats,” said Gabriel freely.  “But they are not even fit for boats.”

“I threw mine as far as I could,” observed Francois.  “You can’t make anything float in them.”

She could see one of them stranded on the lake bottom, loaded with stones, its strings playing back and forth in the clear water.  The others were gone out to the straits.  Jenieve remembered all her toil for them, and her denial of her own wants that she might give to these half-savage boys, who considered nothing lost that they threw into the lake.

She turned around to run to the house.  But there stood Jean Bati’ McClure’s wife, talking through the door, and encouraging her mother to walk with coureurs-de-bois.  The girl’s heart broke.  She took to the bushes to hide her weeping, and ran through them towards the path she had followed so many times when her only living kindred were at the Indian village.  The pine woods received her into their ascending heights, and she mounted towards sunset.