"What is this?"
"Twenty-seven years ago she was here, she whom you are like. I have waited twenty-seven years."
"Tell me about it; I am ready to hear."
"Come here." He beckoned to me from a group of trees, tamaracks, on the other side of the path. He went behind one. I followed him.
"Read," he said. And I read with difficulty, although the lettering was cut deep, one word "Heureuse", and a date "1883. 9. 10."
"'Heureuse'," I repeated. "Happy—happy; oh, I know how happy!"
He looked at me significantly for a moment, and I knew that his "fixed idea" had possession of him. He regarded me, Marcia Farrell, as the child of that "forest love" of nearly twenty-seven years ago.
"You say true; they were happy." Without preliminaries he told me the story he had related to Mr. Ewart and Jamie last year.
"Has Mr. Ewart or Jamie ever seen this tree, André?"
"No. I have told them both of my tree and the notches—but never of this other. You are the first to see it since her blue eyes watched him cut those letters. I have shown it to neither my young comrade nor to the seignior."