Ten days later he came, long after nightfall.  The women were alone in the house with Tit’Be and the children, the father having gone for seed-grain to Honfleur whence he would only return on the morrow.  Telesphore and Alma Rose were asleep, Tit’Be was having a last pipe before the family prayer, when Chien barked several times and got up to sniff at the closed door.  Then two light taps were heard.  The visitor waited for the invitation before he entered and stood before them.

His excuses for so late a call were made without touch of awkwardness.  “We are camped at the end of the portage above the rapids.  The tent had to be pitched and things put in order to make the Belgians comfortable for the night.  When I set out I knew it was hardly the hour for a call and that the paths through the woods must be pretty bad.  But I started all the same, and when I saw your light...”

His high Indian boots were caked with mud to the knee; he breathed a little deeply between words, like a man who has been running; but his keen eyes were quietly confident.

“Only Tit’Be has changed,” said he.  “When you left Mistassini he was but so high...”  With a hand he indicated the stature of a child.  Mother Chapdelaine’s face was bright with interest; doubly pleased to receive a visitor and at the chance of talking about old times.

“Nor have you altered in these seven years; not a bit; as for Maria ... surely you find a difference!”

He gazed at Maria with something of wonder in his eyes.  “You see that ... that I saw her the other day at Peribonka.”  Tone and manner showed that the meeting of a fortnight ago had been allowed to blot the remoter days from his recollection.  But since the talk was of her he ventured an appraising glance.

Her young vigour and health, the beautiful heavy hair and sunburnt neck of a country girl, the frank honesty of eye and gesture, all these things, thought he, were possessions of the child of seven years ago; and twice or thrice he shook his head as though to say that, in truth, she had not changed.  But the consciousness too was there that he, if not she, had changed, for the sight of her before him took strange hold upon his heart.

Maria’s smile was a little timid, but soon she dared to raise her eyes and look at him in turn.  Assuredly a handsome fellow; comely of body, revealing so much of supple strength; comely of face in well-cut feature and fearless eye ...  To herself she said with some surprise that she had not thought him thus—­more forward perhaps, talking freely and rather positively-but now he scarcely spoke at all and everything about him bad an air of perfect simplicity.  Doubtless it was his expression that had given her this idea, and his bold straightforward manner.

Mother Chapdelaine took up her questioning:—­“And so you sold the farm when your father died?”

“Yes, I sold everything.  I was never a very good hand at farming, you know.  Working in the shanties, trapping, making a little money from time to time as a guide or in trade with the Indians, that is the life for me; but to scratch away at the same fields from one year’s end to another, and stay there forever, I would not have been able to stick to that all my life; I would have felt like a cow tethered to a stake.”