“No longer could I withstand the call of the springtime and the woods,” he finished falteringly; “the trading-room and the bargain were grown hateful to me in these warm days with the scent of flower and leaf and heated mould coming in at the door and bidding me come. I left my post, a traitor, Ma'amselle, betrayed by the forest. Too weak am I for courage when the big woods call.”
Maren looked at him and the light grew up in her eyes, that little flame that flickered and leaped and gave so baffling a charm to her beauty.
“Ah!” she said softly; “you love it too, the great wilderness?”
“Aye, most truly.”
“And you can hear the whisper of the far countries, the ripple of distant streams, the wind in the pines that have never sheltered a white man? You know these things, M'sieu?”
She leaned forward from the great smooth-barked tree and looked at him eagerly.
“They are what brought me over seas,” he said quietly, “what sent me to De Seviere, what hold me to the tribes that come each year to my doors.”
Maren's lips were parted, the fire of her passion in her flaming face. “Then you know why I come to the woods, why I grieve that the spring is passing, why I can scarcely hold my soul in patience through this delay!”
With the suddenness of her words her breath had leaped to a heaving tumult, the wide eyes, so calm, so cool, had filled first with fire and then with a mist. That clouded them like tears.
“Oh, M'sieu!” she cried tensely; “know you of that country which lies far to the west and which the Indians call the Land of the Whispering Hills?”