"But I thought you liked the woods!"
"I like being far away. I am tired of Detroit."
"Mam'selle, it would hardly be safe. There are still unfriendly Indians. And—the loneliness of it! For there are some evil spirits about, though Holy Church has banished them from the town."
Occasionally her old beliefs and fears rushed over the Indian woman and shook her in a clutch of terror. She felt safest in her own little nest, under the shadow of the Citadel, with the high, sharp palisades about her, when night came on.
"Art thou afraid of Madame De Ber?" she asked, hesitatingly. "For of a truth she did not want you for her son's wife."
"I know it. Pierre made them all agree to it. I am sorry for Pierre, and yet he has the blindness of a mole. I am not the kind of wife he wants. For though there is so much kissing and caressing at first, there are dinners and suppers, and the man is cross sometimes because other things go wrong. And he smells of the skins and oils and paints, and the dirt, too," laughing. "Faugh! I could not endure it. I would rather dwell in the woods all my life. Why, I should come to hate such a man! I should run away or kill myself. And that would be a bitter self-punishment, for I love so to live if I can have my own life. Pani, why do men want one particular woman? Susette is blithe and merry, and Angelique is pretty as a flower, and when she spins she makes a picture like one the schoolmaster told me about. Oh, yes, there are plenty of girls who would be proud and glad to keep Pierre's house. Why does not the good God give men the right sense of things?"
Pani turned her head mournfully from side to side, and the shrunken lips made no reply.
Then they glided on and on. The blue, sunlit arch overhead, the waving trees that sent dancing shadows like troops of elfin sprites over the water, the fret in one place where a rock broke the murmurous lapping, the swish somewhere else, where grasses and weeds and water blooms rooted in the sedge rocked back and forth with the slow tide—how peaceful it all was!
Yet Jeanne Angelot was not at peace. Why, when the woods or the river always soothed her? And it was not Pierre who disturbed the current, who lay at the bottom like some evil spirit, reaching up long, cruel arms to grasp her. Last summer she had put Louis Marsac out of her life with an exultant thrill. He would forget all about her. He would or had married some one up North, and she was glad.
He had come back. She knew now what this look in a man's eyes meant. She had seen it in a girl's eyes, too, but the girl had the right, and was offering incense to her betrothed. Oh, perhaps—perhaps some other one might attract him, for he was very handsome, much finer and more manly than when he went away.