Meantime the women in their turn had begun to leave the church.  Young or old, pretty or ugly, nearly all were well clad in fur cloaks, or in coats of heavy cloth; for, honouring the Sunday mass, sole festival of their lives, they had doffed coarse blouses and homespun petticoats, and a stranger might well have stood amazed to find them habited almost with elegance in this remote spot; still French to their finger-tips in the midst of the vast lonely forest and the snow, and as tastefully dressed, these peasant women, as most of the middle-class folk in provincial France.

Cleophas Pesant waited for Louisa Tremblay who was alone, and they went off together along the wooden sidewalk in the direction of the house.  Others were satisfied to exchange jocular remarks with the young girls as they passed, in the easy and familiar fashion of the country,-natural enough too where the children have grown up together from infancy.

Pite Gaudreau, looking toward the door of the church, remarked:—­ “Maria Chapdelaine is back from her visit to St. Prime, and there is her father come to fetch her.”  Many in the village scarcely knew the Chapdelaines.

“Is it Samuel Chapdelaine who has a farm in the woods on the other side of the river, above Honfleur?”

“That’s the man.”

“And the girl with him is his daughter?  Maria ...”

“Yes, she has been spending a month at St. Prime with her mother’s people.  They are Bouchards, related to Wilfrid Bouchard of St. Gedeon ...”

Interested glances were directed toward the top of the steps.  One of the young people paid Maria the countryman’s tribute of admiration—­“A fine hearty girl!” said he.

“Right you are!  A fine hearty girl, and one with plenty of spirit too.  A pity that she lives so far off in the woods.  How are the young fellows of the village to manage an evening at their place, on the other side of the river and above the falls, more than a dozen miles away and the last of them with next to no road?”

The smiles were bold enough as they spoke of her, this inaccessible beauty; but as she came down the wooden steps with her father and passed near by, they were taken with bashfulness and awkwardly drew back, as though something more lay between her and them than the crossing of a river and twelve miles of indifferent woodland road.

Little by little the groups before the church dissolved.  Some returned to their houses, after picking up all the news that was going; others, before departing, were for spending an hour in one of the two gathering places of the village; the cur’s house or the general store.  Those who came from the back concessions, stretching along the very border of the forest, one by one untied their horses from the row and brought their sleighs to the foot of the steps for their women and children.

Samuel Chapdelaine and Maria had gone but a little way when a young man halted them.