"No, no," replied Bidiane, hastily. "He wants to marry me."
"That's what I thought," said Claudine, soberly. "I can't tell you what love is. You can't talk it. I guess he'll teach you if you give him a chance. He's a good man, Bidiane. You'd better take him—it's an opening for you, too. He'll get on out in the world."
Bidiane laid her head back on her pillow, and slipped again into a hazy, dreamy condition of mind, in which the ever recurring subject of meditation was the one of the proper experience and manifestation of love between men and the women they adore.
"I don't love him, yet what makes me so cross when he looks at another woman, even my beloved Rose?" she murmured; and with this puzzling question bravely to the fore she fell asleep.
[CHAPTER XIII.]
CHARLITTE COMES BACK.
"From dawn to gloaming, and from dark to dawn,
Dreams the unvoiced, declining Michaelmas.
O'er all the orchards where a summer was
The noon is full of peace, and loiters on.
The branches stir not as the light airs run
All day; their stretching shadows slowly pass
Through the curled surface of the faded grass,
Telling the hours of the cloudless sun."
J. F. H.
The last golden days of summer had come, and the Acadien farmers were rejoicing in a bountiful harvest. Day by day huge wagons, heaped high with grain, were driven to the threshing-mills, and day by day the stores of vegetables and fruit laid in for the winter were increased in barn and store-house.