"Oh, he is as busy as any two men with plans for building up the town,
and workmen, and some women for wives--two of whom are married already,
though one couple did their courting on shipboard. Oh, you must soon get
about. We are going to have a rare summer."

The child raised herself up a trifle and then sank back.

"Oh, dear!" with a little cry.

"Do not mind, _ma petite_. People are always so at first. To-morrow
maybe you can sit up, and a few days after walk. And then go out."

"The world is so lovely and sweet," she murmured. And she was glad she
had not died.

The next day M'sieu Ralph came in. He appeared changed some way, but the
old smile was there. The eyes seemed to have taken on a deeper blue
tint. She stretched out her hands.

"Thank the good God that you are restored, little one," he exclaimed,
with deep fervor. "Only you are a shadow of the Rose who climbed rocks
like a joyous kid less than a year agone. When will you pilot me again?"

She drew a long breath like a sigh.

"And there have been so many happenings. There are new people, though no
little girls among them, for which I am sorry. And already they are
building houses. The Sieur de Champlain has great plans. He will have a
fine city if they work. Why, when thou art an old lady and goest dressed
in silks and velvets and furs, as the women of the mother country, thou
wilt have rare stories to tell to thy grandchildren. And no doubt thou
wilt have seen Paris as well."

Then she smiled, but it was a pitiful attempt.

It was true Quebec had received a wonderful hastening in the new-comers
and in several grants the King had made concerning the fur trade. The
dreary winter was a thing of the past.

Destournier came in the next day and insisted the child should be
wrapped up and carried out in the sunshine. She seemed light as a baby
when he took her in his arms. He seated himself on a bench and held her
closely wound up in Mere's choicest blanket she had brought from St.
Malo, and which had been woven by her grandmother.

Ah, how lovely that savage primeval beauty looked to the child, who felt
more than she could understand. Every pulse seemed instinct with new
life. The gardens with their beds of vegetables, the tall slim spikes of
onions which everybody had been requested to plant plentifully, the
feathery leaves of the young carrots, the beans already in white bloom,
the sword-like leaves of the corn hardly long enough to wave as yet,