e maple-sugar made from the trees on Vadrome Mountain.
She remembered that when she was a girl at school, years ago--ten years
ago--Jo Portugais, then scarcely out of his teens, a cheerful, pleasant,
quick-tempered lad, had brought her bunches of the mountain-ash berry;
that once he had mended the broken runner of her sled; and yet another
time had sent her a birch-bark valentine at the convent, where it was
confiscated by the Mother Superior. Since those days he had become a
dark morose figure, living apart from men, never going to confession,
seldom going to Mass, unloving and unlovable.

There was only one other person in the parish more unloved. That was the
woman called Paulette Dubois, who lived in the little house at the outer
gate of the Manor. Paulette Dubois had a bad name in the parish--so bad
that all women shunned her, and few men noticed her. Yet no one
could say that at the present time she did not live a careful life,
justifying, so far as eye could see, the protection of the Seigneur,
M. Rossignol, a man of queer habits and queerer dress, a dabbler in
physical science, a devout Catholic, and a constant friend of the Cure.
He it was who, when an effort was made to drive Paulette out of the
parish, had said that she should not go unless she wished; that, having
been born in Chaudiere, she had a right to live there and die there; and
if she had sinned there, the parish was in some sense to blame. Though
he had no lodge-gates, and though the seigneury was but a great wide
low-roofed farmhouse, with an observatory, and a chimney-piece dating
from the time of Louis the Fourteenth, the Seigneur gave Paulette Dubois
a little hut at his outer gate, which had been there since the great
Count Frontenac visited Chaudiere. Probably Rosalie spoke to Paulette
Dubois more often than did any one else in the parish, but that was
because the woman came for little things at the shop, and asked for
letters, and every week sent one--to a man living in Montreal. She sent
these letters, but not more than once in six months did she get a reply,
and she had not had one in a whole year. Yet every week she asked, and
Rosalie found it hard to answer her politely, and sometimes showed it.

So it was that the two disliked each other without good cause, save that
they were separated by a chasm as wide as a sea. The one disliked the
other because she must recognise her; the other chafed because she could
be recognised by Rosalie offici