“Aye. It lies circling a great lake, blue as the summer skies, its waters forever rippled by the winds of the west which sing in the grassy vales and over the rounded knolls that stud the region,—a land of waving trees, of high coolness, or rich valleys thick with rank grasses and abounding with the pelt animals. It is the country of the Athabasca and from it came last year a band of the Chippewas heavily laden with furs. They told fine tales of its beauty. It is for that land you are bound?”
“For that land, M'sieu,” said Maren Le Moyne, and her lips trembled; “for that virgin goddess of the dreams of years! I have seen its hills, its waving grass, wind-blown, its leaping streams,—I have breathed the sweet air of its forests and gazed on its beauties since my early childhood, in dreams, always in dreams, M'sieu, until I could bear the strain no longer. And now, when it beckons almost within my reach, when its very breath seems in my nostrils, I must stop for a year's space! You know, M'sieu,—you comprehend?”
She leaned forward looking earnestly into McElroy's eyes, and a surge of painful ecstasy shot to the man's heart, so near she seemed in the suddenly created sympathy of the moment, so near and gracious, so strong in her pure passion, so infinitely sweet.
“I know,” he said, and his voice sounded strange in his ears; “I know every pulse of your heart, Ma'amselle, every longing of your spirit, every pure thought of your mind,—for these many days I have trembled to every vibration that has touched or thrilled you. Oh, Ma'amselle!”
With the surge of that overwhelming thing within him the young man had forgot all things,—that this girl was near a stranger, that he had quaked at his temerity of the gift, forgot all but that she leaned toward him with the mist in her wide eyes, and he strode forward the step between them, his arms reaching out instinctively to enfold her.
With the swiftness of the impulse he swept her into them until the eager face lay on his breast, the smooth black braids pressing his lips with their satiny folds.
For one intoxicating moment he held her, as the primal man takes and holds his woman, tightly against his beating heart as though he would defy the world, lost in a sea of strange new emotions that rolled in golden billows high above his head.
Then from the depths there came a cry that cleared his whirling brain, a very embodiment of startled amaze, of indefinable horror, of mixed intonations.
“M'sieu!”
Maren Le Moyne wrenched herself free and lifted her face to look at him.