Wherever the snow was clear for a few yards, free of dead trees and stumps, and be could lift his eyes without fear of stun-Ning, they were fixed upon Maria; between the woollen cap and the long woollen jersey curving to her vigorous form he saw the outline of her face, downward turned, expressing only gentleness and patience.  Every glance gave fresh reason for his love but brought him no hint of a response.

“This ... this is no place for you, Maria.  The country is too rough, the work too hard; barely earning one’s bread is killing toil.  In a factory over there, clever and strong as you are, soon you would be in the way of making nearly as much as I do; but no need of that if you were my wife.  I earn enough for both of us, and we should have every comfort:  good clothes to wear, a pretty flat in a brick house with gas and hot water, and all sorts of contrivances you never heard of to save you labour and worry every moment of the day.  And don’t let the idea enter your head that all the people are English.  I know many Canadian families who work as I do or even keep shops.  And there is a splendid church with a Canadian priest as cure—­Mr. Tremblay from St. Hyacinthe.  You would never be lonesome ...”

Pausing again he surveyed the white plain with its ragged crop of brown stumps, the bleak plateau dropping a little farther in a long slope to the levels of the frozen river; meanwhile ransacking his mind for some final persuasive word.

“I hardly know what to say ...  You have always lived here and it is not possible for you to guess what life is elsewhere, nor would I be able to make you understand were I to talk forever.  But I love you, Maria, I earn a good wage and I never touch a drop.  If you will marry me as I ask I will take you off to a country that will open your eyes with astonishment—­a fine country, not a bit like this, where we can live in a decent way and be happy for the rest of our days.”

Maria still was silent, and yet the sentences of Lorenzo Surprenant beat upon her heart as succeeding waves roll against the shore.  It was not his avowals of love, honest and sincere though they were, but the lures he used which tempted her.  Only of cheap pleasures had he spoken, of trivial things ministering to comfort or vanity, but of these alone was she able to conjure up a definite idea.  All else—­the distant glamour of the city, of a life new and incomprehensible to her, full in the centre of the bustling world and no longer at its very confines—­enticed her but the more in its shimmering remoteness with the mystery of a great light that shines from afar.

Whatsoever there may be of wonder and exhilaration in the sight and touch of the crowd; the rich harvests of mind and sense for which the city dweller has bartered his rough heritage of pride in the soil, Maria was dimly conscious of as part of this other life in a new world, this glorious re-birth for which she was already yearning.  But above all else the desire was strong upon her now to flee away, to escape.