After that we met each other as comrades meet, and both of us changed like the face of nature, when the snow went and warm winds came.

This looking at her without really approaching was going on innocently when one day Count de Chaumont rode up to the manor, his horse and his attendant servants and horses covered with mud, filling the place with a rush of life.

He always carried himself as if he felt extremely welcome in this world.  And though a man ought to be welcome in his own house, especially when he has made it a comfortable refuge for outsiders, I met him with the secret resentment we bear an interloper.

He looked me over from head to foot with more interest than he had ever before shown.

“We are getting on, we are getting on!  Is it Doctor Chantry, or the little madame, or the winter housing?  Our white blood is very much in evidence.  When Chief Williams comes back to the summer hunting he will not know his boy.”

“The savage is inside yet, monsieur,” I told him.  “Scratch me and see.”

“Not I,” he laughed.

“It is late for thanks, but I will now thank you for taking me into your house.”

“He has learned gratitude for little favors!  That is Madame de Ferrier’s work.”

“I hope I may be able to do something that will square our accounts.”

“That’s Doctor Chantry’s work.  He is full of benevolent intentions—­and never empties himself.  When you have learned all your master knows, what are you going to do with it?”

“I am going to teach our Indians.”

“Good.  You have a full day’s work before you.  Founding an estate in the wilderness is nothing compared to that.  You have more courage than De Chaumont.”

Whether the spring or the return of De Chaumont drove me out, I could no longer stay indoors, but rowed all day long on the lake or trod the quickening woods.  Before old Pierre could get audience with his house accounts, De Chaumont was in Madame de Ferrier’s rooms, inspecting the wafer blotched letter.  He did not appear as depressed as he should have been by the death of his old friend.

“These French have no hearts,” I told Doctor Chantry.

He took off his horn spectacles and wiped his eyes, responding: 

“But they find the way to ours!”

Slipping between islands in water paths that wound as a meadow stream winds through land, I tried to lose myself from the uneasy pain which followed me everywhere.

There may be people who look over the scheme of their lives with entire complacence.  Mine has been the outcome of such strange misfortunes as to furnish evidence that there is another fate than the fate we make ourselves.  In that early day I felt the unseen lines tighten around me.  I was nothing but a young student of unknown family, able to read and write, to talk a little English, with some knowledge of history, geography, mathematics, and Latin.  Strength and scope came by atoms.  I did not know then as I know now that I am a slow grower, even when making gigantic effort.  An oak does not accumulate rings with more deliberation than I change and build myself.