He did not appear in the guise of a comforter, nor of one who gives counsel in the secret affairs of the heart, but rather as a man of the law or a chemist who enunciates his bald formulas, invariable and unfailing.

“The duty of a girl like you—­good-looking, healthy, active withal and a clever housewife—­is in the first place to help her old parents, and in good time to marry and bring up a Christian family of her own.  You have no call to the religious life?  No.  Then you must give up torturing yourself in this fashion, because it is a sacrilegious thing and unseemly, seeing that the young man was nothing whatever to you.  The good God knows what is best for us; we should neither rebel nor complain ...”

In all this, but one phrase left Maria a little doubting, it was the priest’s assurance that Francois Paradis, in the place where now he was, cared only for masses to repose his soul, and never at all for the deep and tender regrets lingering behind him.  This she could not constrain herself to believe.  Unable to think of him otherwise in death than in life, she felt it must bring him something of happiness and consolation that her sorrow was keeping alive their ineffectual love for a little space beyond death.  Yet, since the priest had said it ...

The road wound its way among the trees rising sombrely from the snow.  Here and there a squirrel, alarmed by the swiftly passing sleigh and the tinkling bells, sprang upon a trunk and scrambled upward, clinging to the bark.  From the gray sky a biting cold was falling and the wind stung the cheek, for this was February, with two long months of winter yet to come.

As Charles Eugene trotted along the beaten road, bearing the travellers to their lonely house, Maria, in obedience to the words of the cure at St. Henri, strove to drive away gloom and put mourning from her; as simple-mindedly as she would have fought the temptation of a dance, of a doubtful amusement or anything that was plainly wrong and hence forbidden.

They reached home as night was falling.  The coming of evening was only a slow fading of the light, for, since morning, the heavens had been overcast, the sun obscured.  A sadness rested upon the pallid earth; the firs and cypresses did not wear the aspect of living trees and the naked birches seemed to doubt of the springtime.  Maria shivered as she left the sleigh, and hardly noticed Chien, barking and gambolling a welcome, or the children who called to her from the door-step.  The world seemed strangely empty, for this evening at least.  Love was snatched away, and they forbade remembrance.  She went swiftly into the house without looking about her, conscious of a new dread and hatred for the bleak land, the forest’s eternal shade, the snow and the cold,—­for all those things she had lived her life amongst, which now had wounded her.

CHAPTER XII

LOVE BEARING GIFTS