of
the sweet wine once, when I was a girl, and the memory never leaves me."

"Yet you are often happy?"

"'T is my nature, Monsieur, a legacy of my mother's people; but I am
not always gay of heart when my lips smile."

"And the coming of the French gallant has doubtless freshened your
remembrance of the past?" I said, a trifle bitterly.

"It has indeed," was her frank admission. "He represents a life we
know so little about here on the far frontier. To you, with your code
of border manliness, he may appear all affectation, mere shallow
insincerity; but to me, Captain de Croix represents his class, stands
for the refinements of social order to which women can never be
indifferent. Those were the happiest days of my life, Monsieur; and at
Montreal he was only one among many."

She was gazing out into the black void as she spoke, and the slowly
clearing skies permitted the starlight to gleam in her dark eyes and
reveal the soft contour of her cheek.

"You do not understand that?" she questioned finally, as I failed to
break the silence.

"I have no such pleasant memory to look back upon," I answered; "yet I
can feel, though possibly in a different way, your longing after better
things."

"You realize this sense of loneliness?--this absence of all that makes
life beautiful and worth the living?"

"Perhaps not that,--for life, even here, is well worth living, and to
my eyes the great sea yonder, and the dark forests, are of more
interest than city streets. But in one sense I may enter into your
meaning; my thought also is away from here,--it is with a home,
scarcely less humble than are our present surroundings, yet it contains
the one blessing worth striving after--love."

"Love!" she echoed the unexpected word almost scornfully. "'T is a
phrase so lightly spoken that I scarce know what it may signify to you.
You love some one then, Monsieur?" and she looked up at me curiously.

"My mother, Mademoiselle."

I saw the expression upon her face change instantly. "Your pardon,"
she exclaimed, hastily. "'T was not the meaning I had thought. I know
something of such love as that, and honor you for thus expressing it."

"I have often wondered, since first we met, at your being here,
seemingly alone, at this outermost post of the frontier. It seems a
strange home for one of your refinement and evident delight in social
life."

"'T is not from choice, Monsieur. My mother died when I was but a
child, as