“Cabane de castor, he says—­a beaver cabin.  And the beavers made the dam we just passed.  Did you notice, Janet, how beautifully clean those logs had been cut by their sharp teeth?”

At moments she conversed rapidly with Delphin in the same patois Janet had heard on the streets of Hampton.  How long ago that seemed!

On two occasions, when the falls were sheer, they had to disembark and walk along little portages through the green raspberry bushes.  The prints of great hooves in the black silt betrayed where wild animals had paused to drink.  They stopped for lunch on a warm rock beside a singing waterfall, and at last they turned an elbow in the stream and with suddenly widened vision beheld the lake’s sapphire expanse and the distant circle of hills.  “Les montagnes,” Herve called them as he flung out his pipe, and this Janet could translate for herself.  Eastward they lay lucent in the afternoon light; westward, behind the generous log camp standing on a natural terrace above the landing, they were in shadow.  Here indeed seemed peace, if remoteness, if nature herself might bestow it.

Janet little suspected that special preparations had been made for her comfort.  Early in April, while the wilderness was still in the grip of winter, Delphin had been summoned from a far-away lumber camp to Saint Hubert, where several packing-cases and two rolls of lead pipe from Montreal lay in a shed beside the railroad siding.  He had superintended the transportation of these, on dog sledges, up the frozen decharge, accompanied on his last trip by a plumber of sorts from Beaupre, thirty miles down the line; and between them they had improvised a bathroom, and attached a boiler to the range!  Only a week before the arrival of Madame the spring on the hillside above the camp had been tapped, and the pipe laid securely underground.  Besides this unheard-of luxury for the Lac du Sablier there were iron beds and mattresses and little wood stoves to go in the four bedrooms, which were more securely chinked with moss.  The traditions of that camp had been hospitable.  In Professor Wishart’s day many guests had come and gone, or pitched their tents nearby; and Augusta Maturin, until this summer, had rarely been here alone, although she had no fears of the wilderness, and Delphin brought his daughter Delphine to do the housework and cooking.  The land for miles round about was owned by a Toronto capitalist who had been a friend of her father, and who could afford as a hobby the sparing of the forest.  By his permission a few sportsmen came to fish or shoot, and occasionally their campfires could be seen across the water, starlike glows in the darkness of the night, at morning and evening little blue threads of smoke that rose against the forest; “bocane,” Delphin called it, and Janet found a sweet, strange magic in these words of the pioneer.