Meanwhile Maren Le Moyne sat in the doorway of her sister's cabin with her chin on her hands and stared into the night. Marie and Henri were at the cabin of the Bordoux, laughing and chattering in the gay abandon of youth. She could hear their snatches of songs, their quips and laughter rising now and again in shrill gusts. Also the wailing fiddle seemed a part of the warm night, and the bird that called in the forest.
All the little homely things of the post and the woods crept into her heart, that seemed to her to be opening to a vague knowledge, to be looking down sweet vistas of which she had never dreamed among her other dreams of forest and lake and plain, and, at each distant focus where appeared a new glory of light, there was always the figure of the young factor with his anxious eyes. Strange new thrills raced hotly through her heart and dyed her cheeks in the darkness. She tingled from head to foot at the memory of that day in the glade, and for the first time in her life she read the love-signs in a man. That change in his eyes when he had looked upon De Courtenay's red flower was jealousy. With the thought came a greater fulness of the unexplainable joy that had flooded her all these days. Aye, verily, that red flower had caused him pain,—him,—with his laughing blue eyes and his fair head tilted back ever ready for mirth, with his tender mouth and his strong hands. The very thought of that killed the joy of the other. If love was jealousy, and jealousy was pain, the one must be healed for sake of the other. With this girl to think was to do, and with that last discovery she was upon her feet, straight and lithe as a young animal beside the door. She would go to this man and tell him that the red flower was less than nothing to her, its giver less than it.
At that moment a figure came out of the dusk and stopped before her.
It was her leader, Prix Laroux, silent, a shadow of the shadows.
“Maren,” he said, in that deep confidence of trusted friends, “Maren, is all well with you?”
“All is well, Prix,” said the girl, her voice tremulous with pleasure, “most assuredly. Thought you aught was wrong?”
“Nay,—only I felt the desire to know.”
“Friend,” said Maren, reaching out a hand which the man took strongly in both his own; “good, good friend! Ever you are at my back.”
“Where you may easily reach me when you will.”
“I know. 'Tis you alone have made possible the long trail. Ah! how long until another spring?”