"You make it so." Her eyes were bewitchingly downcast and a faint color fluttered over her face, while her pretty hands worked nervously.
He paced the gallery afterward in the twilight, when the stars were slowly finding their way through the blue vault overhead, and the river plashed by with its monotone of music. She might desire to return to France; this life in the wilderness did not appeal to delicate women. Yet she had taken it very cheerfully, he thought.
If she decided to stay—there was one way in which he could befriend her, perhaps make her happy again. Marriage was hardly considered the outcome of love in that period, many other considerations entered into it. There were betrothals where the future husband and wife saw each other for the first time. And they did very well. His ideas of married life were a sort of good-fellowship and admiration, if the woman was pretty; good cooking and a desire to please among the commoner ones. At four and twenty he had not given the matter much consideration. Madame Giffard was full thirty, but she looked like a girl in her lightness and grace. And he owed the memory of M. Giffard something. This step would make amends and allay a troublesome sort of conscience in the matter.
CHAPTER VIII
WHAT ROSE DID NOT LIKE
Eustache Boullé, the Governor's brother-in-law, had been not a little surprised when his sister was helped off the vessel at Tadoussac. He greeted her warmly.
"But I never believed you would come to this wild country," he exclaimed, with a half-mischievous smile. "I am afraid the Sieur has let his hopes of the future run riot in his brain. He can see great things with that far gaze of his."
"But a good wife follows her husband. We have had a rather stormy and tiresome passage, but praised be the saints, we have at last reached our haven."
"I hope you will see some promise in it. We on the business side do not look for pleasure alone."