Three years!  Maria thought to herself that she had only seen Francois Paradis twice since she was a child, and she felt ashamed at the beating of her heart.

CHAPTER IV

WILD LAND

After a few chilly days, June suddenly brought veritable spring weather.  A blazing sun warmed field and forest, the lingering patches of snow vanished even in the deep shade of the woods; the Peribonka rose and rose between its rocky banks until the alders and the roots of the nearer spruces were drowned; in the roads the mud was incredibly deep.  The Canadian soil rid itself of the last traces of winter with a semblance of mad haste, as though in dread of another winter already on the way.

Esdras and Da’Be returned from the shanties where they had worked all the winter.  Esdras was the eldest of the family, a tall fellow with a huge frame, his face bronzed, his hair black; the low forehead and prominent chin gave him a Neronian profile, domineering, not without a suggestion of brutality; but be spoke softly, measuring his words, and was endlessly patient.  In face alone had he anything of the tyrant; it was as though the long rigours of the climate and the fine sense and good humour of the race had refined his heart to a simplicity and kindliness that his formidable aspect seemed to deny.

Da’Be, also tall, was less heavily built and more lively and merry.  He was like his father.

The married couple had given their first children, Esdras and Maria, fine, high-sounding, sonorous names; but they had apparently wearied of these solemnities, for the next two children never beard their real names pronounced; always had they been called by the affectionate diminutives of childhood, Da’Be and Tit’Be.  With the last pair, however, there had been a return to the earlier ceremonious manner-Telesphore ...  Alma Rose.  “When the boys get back we are going to make land,” the father had promised.  And, with the help of Edwige Legare, their hired man, they set about the task.

In the Province of Quebec there is much uncertainty in the spelling and the use of names.  A scattered people in a huge half-wild country, unlettered for the most part and with no one to turn to for counsel but the priests, is apt to pay attention only to the sound of names, caring nothing about their appearance when written or the sex to which they pertain.  Pronunciation has naturally varied in one mouth or another, in this family or that, and when a formal occasion calls for writing, each takes leave to spell his baptismal name in his own way, without a passing thought that there may be a canonical form.  Borrowings from other languages have added to the uncertainties of orthography and gender.  Individuals sign indifferently, Denise, Denije or Deneije; Conrad or Courade; men bear such names as Hermenegilde, Aglae, Edwige.