The lake was a large one, shaped like an hourglass, as its name implied, and Augusta Maturin sometimes paddled Janet through the wide, shallow channel to the northern end, even as she had once paddled Gifford.  Her genius was for the helpless.  One day, when the waters were high, and the portages could be dispensed with, they made an excursion through the Riviere des Peres to the lake of that name, the next in the chain above.  For luncheon they ate the trout Augusta caught; and in the afternoon, when they returned to the mouth of the outlet, Herve, softly checking the canoe with his paddle, whispered the word “Arignal!” Thigh deep in the lush grasses of the swamp was an animal with a huge grey head, like a donkey’s, staring foolishly in their direction—­a cow moose.  With a tremendous commotion that awoke echoes in the forest she tore herself from the mud and disappeared, followed by her panic-stricken offspring, a caricature of herself....

By September the purple fireweed that springs up beside old camps, and in the bois brute, had bloomed and scattered its myriad, impalpable thistledowns over crystal floors.  Autumn came to the Laurentians.  In the morning the lake lay like a quicksilver pool under the rising mists, through which the sun struck blinding flashes of light.  A little later, when the veil had lifted, it became a mirror for the hills and crags, the blue reaches of the sky.  The stinging air was spiced with balsam.  Revealed was the incredible brilliance of another day,—­the arsenic-green of the spruce, the red and gold of the maples, the yellow of the alders bathing in the shallows, of the birches, whose white limbs could be seen gleaming in the twilight of the thickets.  Early, too early, the sun fell down behind the serrated forest-edge of the western hill, a ball of orange fire....  One evening Delphin and Herve, followed by two other canoes, paddled up to the landing.  New visitors had arrived, Dr. McLeod, who had long been an intimate of the Wishart family, and with him a buxom, fresh-complexioned Canadian woman, a trained nurse whom he had brought from Toronto.

There, in nature’s wilderness, Janet knew the supreme experience of women, the agony, the renewal and joy symbolic of nature herself.  When the child was bathed and dressed in the clothes Augusta Maturin herself had made for it, she brought it into the room to the mother.

“It’s a daughter,” she announced.

Janet regarded the child wistfully.  “I hoped it would be a boy,” she said.  “He would have had—­a better chance.”  But she raised her arms, and the child was laid in the bed beside her.

“We’ll see that she has a chance, my dear,” Augusta Maturin replied, as she kissed her.