One of the Montagnais brought us the mail once a week from Roberval. The first of August he brought up a telegram that announced the Doctor would be with us the next day. Mr. Ewart decided to meet him at the last portage. André the Second went with him. They would be back just after dark that same day, he said. André the First was left to reign supreme in camp during his absence.
"I am only as old as my heart, mademoiselle; you know that is young, and you make it younger while you are here," he said that afternoon, when he and I were trimming the camp with forest greens for the Doctor's coming, and Jamie was laying a beacon pile near the shore, just north of the camp where there was no underbrush or trees. André told us its light could be seen far down the lake.
After supper I lay down in my hammock-couch, swung beneath the pines at the back of the camp. As I rocked there in the twilight, counting off the minutes of waiting by my heartbeats, I heard Jamie and André talking as they smoked together, and rested after the exertions of the day.
"How came you to think of it, André?"
"How came le bon Dieu to give me eyes—and sight like a hawk?"
"But why are you so sure?"
"Why? Because what I see, I see. What I hear, I hear. It is the same voice I hear in the forest; the same laugh like the little forest brook; the same face that used to look at itself in the pool and smile at what it saw there; the same eyes—non, they are different. I found those others in the wood violets; these match the young chestnuts just breaking from the burrs after the first frost."
"But, André, it was so many years ago."
"To me it is as yesterday, when I see her paddling the canoe and swaying like a reed in the gentle wind."
"And you never knew her name?"