Never again did they speak of love, nor even so much as skirt its fringes, though the young trapper read with wistful eyes its working in the woman's face. Out of her eyes had gone a certain light to be replaced by another, as if a star had passed near a smouldering world and gone on, changed by the contact, its radiance darkened by a deeper glow.
The firm cheeks, dusky as sunset, had lost something of their contour.
Like comrades, too, they shared the work and the watches, the girl standing guard with rifle and ball while Dupre snatched heavy sleep, herself dropping down like the veriest old wolf of the North on mossy bank or green grass for the rest they sternly shortened.
“'Tis near the time of the Hudson's Bay brigade, is it not, M'sieu?” she would ask sometimes. “Think you we shall meet them surely if we skirt the eastern shore of Winnipeg?”
And Dupre would always answer, “Assuredly. By the third week in July they will be at the upper bend where the river comes down from York. The Nakonkirhirinons will hold to the west, going up Nelson River and west through the chain of little lakes that lie to the south of Winnipeg, thence gaining Deer River and that Reindeer Lake which sends them forth into their unknown region beyond the Oujuragatchousibi. We, then, will make straight for the eastern shore, skirting upward to the interception of the ways, and we will surely meet the brigade.”
“And they will surely lend help, think you, to a factor of the Company in such grave plight?”
“Surely, Ma'amselle.”
So the hours of day and darkness slipped by with dip of paddle and with portage, with snatched rest and fare of the wild.
In a plentiful forest and on an abundant stream Dupre was at no loss for food. Trout, sparkling and fresh from the icy water, roasted on forked sticks stuck in the ground beside a bed of coals, made fare for an epicure, and the young trapper, watching Maren as she knelt to tend them, shielding her face with her hand, thought wistfully of a cabin where the fire leaped on the hearth and where this woman passed back and forth at the tasks of home.
“'Tis too great a thing to ask of le bon Dieu,” he said in his heart; “'tis not permitted even that one dream of such joy,—'twould be heaven robbed of its glory.”