"What a great fellow you are, Pierre! I wish you good luck. Jeanne—"
Jeanne had almost forgotten her childish anger, and the love making was silly, even in remembrance.
"Surely I wish thee good luck, Pierre," she said formally, with a smile not too warm about her rosy lips. "And a fortunate hunting and trading."
"A safe return, Mam'selle, put that in," he pleaded.
"A safe return."
Then they shook hands and he went his way, thinking with great comfort that she had not flouted him.
It was quite a great thing to see the boats go out. Sweethearts and wives congregated on the wharves. Some few brave women went with their husbands. Other ships were setting out for Montreal well loaded, and one or two were carrying a gay lot of passengers.
After a few weeks, quiet returned, the streets were no longer crowded and the noisy reveling was over for a while. The farmers were busy out of doors, cattle were lowing, chanticleer rang out his call to work in the early morn, and busy hens were caroling in cheerful if unmusical voices. Trees budded into a beautiful haze and then sprang into leaf, into bloom. The rough social hilarity was over for a while.
A few of the emigrant farmers laughed at the clumsy, wasteful French methods and tried their own, which were laughed at in turn, but there was little disputing.
Easter had fallen early and it had been cold, but Whitsuntide made amends, and was, if anything, a greater festival. For a procession formed at St. Anne's, young girls in gala attire, smart, middle-aged women with new caps and kerchiefs, husbands and sons, and not a few children, and marched out of the Pontiac gate, as it was called in remembrance of the long siege. Forty years before Jacques Campeau had built the first little outside chapel on his farm, which had a great stretch of ground. The air was full of the fragrance of fruit blossoms and hardly needed incense. Ah, how beautiful it was in a sort of pastoral simplicity! And after saying mass, Father Frechette blessed and prayed for fertile fields and good crops and generous hearts that tithes might not be withheld, and the faithful rewarded. Then they went to the Fulcher farm, where, in a chapel not much more than a shrine, the service was again said with the people kneeling around in the grass. The farmers and good housewives placed more faith in this than in the methods of the newcomers with their American wisdom. But it was a pleasing service. The procession changed about a little,—the young men walking with the demoiselles and whispering in their listening ears.