"How do you dare take this liberty with me, Monsieur," she said, her eyes kindled with anger and hurt pride. "You first meanly come and intrude upon my privacy; next you must turn what knowledge you gain by acting spy and eavesdropper, into a means of offering me insult. You have heard me say that I had no lover to sigh for me. I spoke the truth: I have no such lover. But you I will not accept as one." And turning with flushed cheek and gleaming eyes, she entered a cosy, clean-kept cottage. But she soon reflected that she had been guilty of an inhospitable act in not asking the strangers to enter. Suddenly turning, she walked rapidly back, and overtook the crest-fallen wooer and his companion, and said in a voice from which every trace of her late anger had disappeared.
"Entrez, Messieurs."
The man's countenance speedily lost its gloom, and, respectfully touching his hat, he said:
"Oui, Mademoiselle, avec le plus grand plaisir." Tripping lightly ahead she announced the two strangers, and then returned, going to the bars where the cows were lowing, waiting to be milked. The persistent stranger had not, by any means, made up his mind to desist in his wooing.
"The colt shies," he murmured, "when she first sees the halter. Presently, she becomes tractable enough." Then, while he sat waiting for the evening meal, blithely through the hush of the exquisite evening came the voice of the girl. She was singing from La Claire Fontaine.
"A la claire fontaine
Je m'allais promener,
J'ai trouve l'eau si belle
Que je me suis baigne"
Her song ended with her work, and as she passed the strangers with her two flowing pails of yellow milk, Riel whispered softly, as he touched her sweet little hand:
"Ah, ma petite amie!"
The same flash came in her eyes, the same proud blood appeared red through the dusk of her cheek, but she restrained herself. He was a guest under her father's roof, and she would suffer the offence to pass. The persistent gallant was more crest-fallen by this last silent rebuke than by the first with its angry words. The first, in his vanity, he had deemed an outburst of petulance, instead of an expression of personal dislike, especially as the girl had so suddenly calmed herself, and extended hospitalities.
He gnashed his teeth that a half-breed girl, in an obscure village, should resent his advances; he for whom, if his own understanding was to be trusted, so many bright eyes were languishing. At the evening meal he received courteous, kindly attention from Annette; but this was all. He related with much eloquence all that he had seen in the big world in the East, during his school days, and took good care that his hosts should know how important a person he was in the colony of Red River. To his mortification, he frequently observed in the midst of one of his most self-glorifying speeches that the girl's eyes were abstracted. He was certain that she was not interested in him, or in his exploits.