“Why,” he said, astounded beyond measure, “why, Francette,—­little one, what does this mean?”

But Francette had lost her tongue and there was no answer from the bowed figure at his knees.

He put out a hand and laid it on her shoulder and it was shaken with sobs,—­the sobs of a woman who has cast her all on the throw of the die and in a panic would have it back.

Off in the forest a night bird called to its mate and the squeaky fiddle whined dolorously and a profound pity began to well in the factor’s heart.  She was such a little maid, such a childish thing, a veritable creature of the sunlight, like those great golden butterflies that danced in the flowered glades of the woods, and she had brought her one great gift to him unasked.

Some thought of Maren Le Moyne and of that reckless cavalier with his curls and his red flowers crept into his voice and made it wondrously tender with sympathy.

“Sh, little one,” he comforted, as he had comforted that day on the river bank when she had wept over Loup; “come up and let us talk of this.”  He lifted her as one would lift a child and strove to raise the weeping eyes from the shelter of her hands, but the small head drooped toward him so near that it was but a step until it lay in the shelter of his shoulder, and he was rocking a bit, unconsciously, as the sobbing grew less pitiful.

“Sh-sh-little one,” he said gently; “sh—­sh.”

Meanwhile Maren Le Moyne sat in the doorway of her sister’s cabin with her chin on her hands and stared into the night.  Marie and Henri were at the cabin of the Bordoux, laughing and chattering in the gay abandon of youth.  She could hear their snatches of songs, their quips and laughter rising now and again in shrill gusts.  Also the wailing fiddle seemed a part of the warm night, and the bird that called in the forest.

All the little homely things of the post and the woods crept into her heart, that seemed to her to be opening to a vague knowledge, to be looking down sweet vistas of which she had never dreamed among her other dreams of forest and lake and plain, and, at each distant focus where appeared a new glory of light, there was always the figure of the young factor with his anxious eyes.  Strange new thrills raced hotly through her heart and dyed her cheeks in the darkness.  She tingled from head to foot at the memory of that day in the glade, and for the first time in her life she read the love-signs in a man.  That change in his eyes when he had looked upon De Courtenay’s red flower was jealousy.  With the thought came a greater fulness of the unexplainable joy that had flooded her all these days.  Aye, verily, that red flower had caused him pain,—­him,—­with his laughing blue eyes and his fair head tilted back ever ready for mirth, with his tender mouth and his strong hands.  The very thought of that killed the joy of the other.  If love was jealousy, and jealousy was pain, the one must be healed for sake of the other.  With this girl to think was to do, and with that last discovery she was upon her feet, straight and lithe as a young animal beside the door.  She would go to this man and tell him that the red flower was less than nothing to her, its giver less than it.