With returned consciousness to McElroy, there came back to the little maid much of her damask beauty.  The pretty cheeks bloomed again and she was like some bright butterfly flitting about the bare room in her red kirtle.

Sometimes McElroy would smile, watching her play with a young bob-cat, which some trapper had brought her from the woods, and whose savage playfulness seemed to be held in leash under her small hands.  The creature would mouth and fawn upon her, taking her cuffs and slaps, and follow her about like a dog.

Rette tolerated the two with a bad grace, for, since the day when Maren Le Moyne had stood at the door with her haggard beauty so wistfully sad, her sympathies had been all with the strange girl of Grand Portage.

Light and flitting, sparkling as an elf, full to the brim of laughter and light, little Francette was playing the deepest game of her life.

With the cunning of a woman she was trying to woo this man back to the joy of earth, to wind herself into his heart, and so to fill his hours with her brightness that he would come to need her always.

So she came by day and day, and now it would be some steaming dainty cooked at her father’s hearth by her own hands, again a branch of the fir-tree coated with ice and sparkling with a million gems, that she brought into the dull blankness of the room, and with her there always came a fresh sweet breath of the winter world without.

McElroy smiled at her pretty conceits, her babbling talk, her gambols, and her gifts.

“What have you done with Loup, little one?” he asked, one day.  “Does he wait on the steps to growl at this usurper purring at your heels?”

The little maid grew pearly white and looked away at Rette fearfully, as if at sudden loss, in danger of some betrayal.

“Nay,” she said, “Loup...is an ingrate.  He has ceased to care.”

And always after she avoided aught that could excite mention of the dog.

But, in spite of all her effort, McElroy lay week after week in the back room, looking for hours together into the red heart of the fire, silent, uncomplaining, in no apparent pain, but shiftless as an Indian in the matter of life.

The business of the factory was brought to him nightly by Ridgar and the young clerk Gifford, and he would look over things and make a few suggestions, dispose of this and that as a matter of course and fall back into his lethargy.

“What think you, M’sieu?” asked Rette anxiously, of Ridgar.  “Is there naught to stir him from these hours of dulness?”

“I know not, Rette.  Would I did!  The surgeon says there is nothing wrong with the man, save lack of desire to live.  He has lost the love of life.”

And so it seemed.  Weeks dragged themselves by and months rolled after them, and still he lay in a great weakness that held his strong limbs as in a vice.

Winter was roaring itself away with tearing winds, with snow that fell and drifted against the stockade wall, and fell again, with vast silences and cold that glazed the surface of the world with ice.