In the stillness of the night the roar of the fall sounds loud and near; the north-west wind sways the tops of spruce and fir with a sweet cool sighing; again and again, farther away and yet farther, an owl is hooting; the chill that ushers in the dawn is still remote.  And Maria, in perfect contentment, rests upon the step, watching the ruddy beam from her fire-flickering, disappearing, quickened again to birth.

She seems to remember someone long since whispering in her ear that the world and life were cheerless and gray.  The daily round, brightened only by a few unsatisfying, fleeting pleasures; the slow passage of unchanging years; the encounter with some young man, like other young men, whose patient and hopeful courting ends by whining affection; a marriage then, and afterwards a vista of days under another roof, but scarce different from those that went before.  So does one live, the voice had told her.  Naught very dreadful in the prospect, and, even were it so, what possible but submission; yet all level, dreary and chill as an autumn field.

It is not true!  Alone there in the darkness Maria shakes her head, a smile upon her lips, and knows how far from true it is.  When she thinks of Paradis, his look, his bearing, of what they are and will be to one another, be and she, something within her bosom has strange power to burn with the touch of fire, and yet to make her shiver.  All the strong youth of her, the long-suffering of her sooth-fast heart find place in it; in the upspringing of hope and of longing, this vision of her approaching miracle of happiness.

Below the oven the red gleam quivers and fails.

“The bread must be ready!” she murmurs to herself.  But she cannot bring herself at once to rise, loth as she is to end the fair dream that seems only beginning.

CHAPTER VII

A MEAGER REAPING

September arrived, and the dryness so welcome for the hay-making persisted till it became a disaster.  According to the Chapdelaines, never had the country been visited with such a drought as this, and every day a fresh motive was suggested for the divine displeasure.

Oats and wheat took on a sickly colour ere attaining their growth; a merciless sun withered the grass and the clover aftermath, and all day long the famished cows stood lowing with their heads over the fences.  They had to be watched continually, for even the meager standing crop was a sore temptation, and never a day went by but one of them broke through the rails in the attempt to appease her hunger among the grain.

Then, of a sudden one evening, as though weary of a constancy so unusual, the wind shifted and in the morning came the rain.  It fell off and on for a week, and when it ceased and the wind hauled again to the north-west, autumn had come.

The autumn!  And it seemed as though spring were here but yesterday.  The grain was yet unripe, though yellowed by the drought; nothing save the hay was in barn; the other crops could draw nutriment from the soil only while the too brief summer warmed it, and already autumn was here, the forerunner of relentless winter, of the frosts, and soon the snows ...