Maren looked at him and the light grew up in her eyes, that little flame that flickered and leaped and gave so baffling a charm to her beauty.

“Ah!” she said softly; “you love it too, the great wilderness?”

“Aye, most truly.”

“And you can hear the whisper of the far countries, the ripple of distant streams, the wind in the pines that have never sheltered a white man?  You know these things, M’sieu?”

She leaned forward from the great smooth-barked tree and looked at him eagerly.

“They are what brought me over seas,” he said quietly, “what sent me to De Seviere, what hold me to the tribes that come each year to my doors.”

Maren’s lips were parted, the fire of her passion in her flaming face.  “Then you know why I come to the woods, why I grieve that the spring is passing, why I can scarcely hold my soul in patience through this delay!”

With the suddenness of her words her breath had leaped to a heaving tumult, the wide eyes, so calm, so cool, had filled first with fire and then with a mist.  That clouded them like tears.

“Oh, M’sieu!” she cried tensely; “know you of that country which lies far to the west and which the Indians call the Land of the Whispering Hills?”

“Aye.  It lies circling a great lake, blue as the summer skies, its waters forever rippled by the winds of the west which sing in the grassy vales and over the rounded knolls that stud the region,—­a land of waving trees, of high coolness, or rich valleys thick with rank grasses and abounding with the pelt animals.  It is the country of the Athabasca and from it came last year a band of the Chippewas heavily laden with furs.  They told fine tales of its beauty.  It is for that land you are bound?”

“For that land, M’sieu,” said Maren Le Moyne, and her lips trembled; “for that virgin goddess of the dreams of years!  I have seen its hills, its waving grass, wind-blown, its leaping streams,—­I have breathed the sweet air of its forests and gazed on its beauties since my early childhood, in dreams, always in dreams, M’sieu, until I could bear the strain no longer.  And now, when it beckons almost within my reach, when its very breath seems in my nostrils, I must stop for a year’s space!  You know, M’sieu,—­you comprehend?”

She leaned forward looking earnestly into McElroy’s eyes, and a surge of painful ecstasy shot to the man’s heart, so near she seemed in the suddenly created sympathy of the moment, so near and gracious, so strong in her pure passion, so infinitely sweet.

“I know,” he said, and his voice sounded strange in his ears; “I know every pulse of your heart, Ma’amselle, every longing of your spirit, every pure thought of your mind,—­for these many days I have trembled to every vibration that has touched or thrilled you.  Oh, Ma’amselle!”

With the surge of that overwhelming thing within him the young man had forgot all things,—­that this girl was near a stranger, that he had quaked at his temerity of the gift, forgot all but that she leaned toward him with the mist in her wide eyes, and he strode forward the step between them, his arms reaching out instinctively to enfold her.