“Good day to you, Mr. Chapdelaine.  Good day, Miss Maria.  I am in great luck at meeting you, since your farm is so high up the river and I don’t often come this way myself.”

His bold eyes travelled from one to the other.  When he averted them it seemed by a conscious effort of politeness; swiftly they returned, and their glance, bright, keen, full of honest eagerness, was questioning and disconcerting.

“Francois Paradis!” exclaimed Chapdelaine.

“This is indeed a bit of luck, for I haven’t seen you this long while, Francois.  And your father dead too.  Have you held on to the farm?” The young man did not answer; he was looking expectantly at Maria with a frank smile, awaiting a word from her.

“You remember Francois Paradis of Mistassini, Maria?  He has changed very little.”

“Nor have you, Mr. Chapdelaine.  But your daughter, that is a different story; she is not the same, yet I should have known her at once.”

They had spent the last evening at St. Michel de Mistassini-viewing everything in the full light of the afternoon:  the great wooden bridge, covered in and painted red, not unlike an amazingly long Noah’s ark; the high hills rising almost from the very banks of the river, the old monastery crouched between the river and the heights, the water that seethed and whitened, flinging itself in wild descent down the staircase of a giant.  But to see this young man after seven years, and to hear his name spoken, aroused in Maria memories clearer and more lively than she was able to evoke of the events and sights of yesterday.

“Francois Paradis! ...  Why surely, father, I remember Francois Paradis.”  And Francois, content, gave answer to the questions of a moment ago.

“No, Mr. Chapdelaine, I have not kept the farm.  When the good man died I sold everything, and since then I have been nearly all the time in the woods, trapping or bartering with the Indians of Lake Mistassini and the Riviere aux Foins.  I also spent a couple of years in the Labrador.”  His look passed once more from Samuel Chapdelaine to Maria, and her eyes fell.

“Are you going home to-day?” he asked.

“Yes; right after dinner.”

“I am glad that I saw you, for I shall be passing up the river near your place in two or three weeks, when the ice goes out.  I am here with some Belgians who are going to buy furs from the Indians; we shall push up so soon as the river is clear, and if we pitch a tent above the falls close to your farm I will spend the evening with you.”

“That is good, Francois, we will expect you.”

The alders formed a thick and unbroken hedge along the river Peribonka; but the leafless stems did not shut away the steeply sloping bank, the levels of the frozen river, the dark hem of the woods crowding to the farther edge-leaving between the solitude of the great trees, thick-set and erect, and the bare desolateness of the ice only room for a few narrow fields, still for the most part uncouth with stumps, so narrow indeed that they seemed to be constrained in the grasp of an unkindly land.