The dinner over at last, some of the guests departed after lighting their pipes.  The cure, catching a glance from Chapdelaine, seemed to recall something; arising, he motioned to Maria, and went before her into the next room which served him both for visitors and as his office.

A small harmonium stood against the wall; on the other side was a table with agricultural journals, a Civil Code and a few books bound in black leather; on the walls hung a portrait of Pius X., an engraving of the Holy Family, the coloured broadside of a Quebec merchant with sleighs and threshing-machines side by side, and a number of official notices as to precautions against forest fires and epidemics amongst cattle.

Turning to Maria, the cure said kindly enough;—­“So it appears that you are distressing yourself beyond what is reasonable and right?”

She looked at him humbly, not far from believing that the priest’s supernatural power had divined her trouble without need of telling.  He inclined his tall figure, and bent toward her his thin peasant face; for beneath the robe was still the tiller of the soil:  the gaunt and yellow visage, the cautious eyes, the huge bony shoulders.  Even his hands—­hands wont to dispense the favours of Heaven-were those of the husbandman, with swollen veins beneath the dark skin.  But Maria saw in him only the priest, the cure of the parish, appointed of God to interpret life to her and show her the path of duty.

“Be seated there,” he said, pointing to a chair.  She sat down somewhat like a schoolgirl who is to have a scolding, somewhat like a woman in a sorcerer’s den who awaits in mingled hope and dread the working of his unearthly spells... ... ...

An hour later the sleigh was speeding over the hard snow.  Chapdelaine drowsed, and the reins were slipping from his open hands.  Rousing himself and lifting his head, he sang again in full-voiced fervour the hymn he was singing as they left the village:—­

    ...  Adorons-le dans le ciel. 
    Adorons-le sur l’autel ...

Then he fell silent, his chin dropping slowly toward his breast, and the only sound upon the road was the tinkle of sleigh-bells.

Maria was thinking of the priest’s words:  “If there was affection between you it is very proper that you should know regret.  But you were not pledged to one another, because neither you nor he had spoken to your parents; therefore it is not befitting or right that you should sorrow thus, nor feel so deep a grief for a young man who, after all is said, was nothing to you...”

And again:  “That masses should be sung, that you should pray for him, such things are useful and good, you could do no better.  Three high masses with music, and three more when the boys return from the woods, as your father has asked me, most assuredly these will help him, and also you may be certain they will delight him more than your lamentations, since they will shorten by so much his time of expiation.  But to grieve like this, and to go about casting gloom over the household is not well, nor is it pleasing in the sight of God.”