Dealing with acres, and with people wild as flocks, would have been worth while if nothing had resulted except our welcome back to Pierre Grignon’s open house.  The grandmother hobbled on her stick across the floor to give me her hand.  Madame Ursule reproached me with delaying, and Pierre said it was high time to seek winter quarters.  The girls recounted harvest reels and even weddings, with dances following, which I had lost while away from the center of festivity.

The little negro carried my saddlebags to the guest room.  Skenedonk was to sleep on the floor.  Abundant preparations for the evening meal were going forward in the kitchen.  As I mounted the stairway at Madame Ursule’s direction, I heard a tinkle of china, her very best, which adorned racks and dressers.  It was being set forth on the mahogany board.

The upper floor of Pierre Grignon’s house was divided by a hall similar to the one below.  I ran upstairs and halted.

Standing with her back to the fading light which came through one fan window at the hall end, was a woman’s figure in a gray dress.  I gripped the rail.

My first thought was:  “How shall I tell her about Paul?” My next was:  “What is the matter with her?”

She rippled from head to foot in the shiver of rapture peculiar to her, and stretched her arms to me crying: 

“Paul!  Paul!”

VII

“Oh, Madame!” I said, bewildered, and sick as from a stab.  It was no comfort that the high lady who scarcely allowed me to kiss her hand before we parted, clung around my neck.  She trembled against me.

“Have you come back to your mother, Paul?”

“Eagle!” I pleaded.  “Don’t you know me?  You surely know Lazarre!”

She kissed me, pulling my head down in her arms, the velvet mouth like a baby’s, and looked straight into my eyes.

“Madame, try to understand!  I am Louis!  If you forget Lazarre, try to remember Louis!”

She heard with attention, and smiled.  The pressure of my arms spoke to her.  A man’s passion addressed itself to a little child.  All other barriers which had stood between us were nothing to this.  I held her, and she could never be mine.  She was not ill in body; the contours of her upturned face were round and softened with much smiling.  But mind-sickness robbed me of her in the moment of finding her.

“She can’t be insane!” I said aloud.  “Oh, God, anything but that!  She was not a woman that could be so wrecked.”

Like a fool I questioned, and tried to get some explanation.

Eagle smoothed my arm, nested her hand in my neck.

“My little boy!  He has grown to be a man—­while his mother has grown down to be a child!  Do you know what I am now, Paul?”

I choked a sob in my throat and told her I did not.

“I am your Cloud-Mother.  I live in a cloud.  Do you love me while I am in the cloud?”