“Ma'amselle,” he said presently, when the turquoise had faded to purple and the purple to velvet black, with the stars like a dowager's diamonds thickset upon it, “Ma'amselle, what think you is behind the stars?”
Maren turned her face to him like a sweet young moon, pale in the night.
“Behind the stars? Why, Heaven, M'sieu, where all is glory; Heaven assuredly.”
“Aye. Where all is glory. Yes, for those who keep the holy mandates, whose hearts are pure as that heaven itself. For such as you. Oh, Holy Mother!—” his voice fell to a whisper; “there is no heaven, Ma'amselle, so pure as the white heart of you! But for him whose days have gone like the butterfly's flight from one prodigal joy to the next, whose heart has known neither love of God nor love of a good woman, save for a little space, whose tongue has boasted and blasphemed, and whose life has been worth no jot of good,—what, think you, a waits so lost a man as this?”
The light “whoosh,—sst—whoosh” of the dipping paddles, the occasional rattle of a handle on a gunwale, formed a blending background against which his low words were distinguishable only to the girl beside him.
She looked long into his upturned face. The wistfulness sat heavy upon it. The youthfulness of this dashing trapper of the posts and settlements came out plain in the starlight. She saw again the pliant strength beneath the slender grace, caught the suggestion of contradicting forces that she had felt one day in Marie's doorway when young Dupre swung up the main way of Fort de Seviere, and beneath it all she saw that which had caused her to say on that first morning of the long trail when he faced her in the hidden cove, “Would it had been given me to love you, M'sieu!”
All this passed through her aching heart, and presently she said with a little catch in her deep voice,
“What awaits a man like this? A man who has done all these things and who speaks of their folly, who thinks of God in the nighttimes, whose heart turns with longing to that land behind the stars, and who gives,”—she paused a moment,—“I cannot say the rest,—But—but—Oh, there awaits this man the smile of that Christ of the Seven Scars, the loving tears of Our Lady of Sorrows, the very grace of the Good God!”
“Truly,—Ma'amselle?” asked Marc Dupre wistfully, “in your heart—not out of its goodness?”
“In my heart of hearts I think this, M'sieu.”