kering, disappearing,
quickened again to birth.

She seems to remember someone long since whispering in her ear that
the world and life were cheerless and gray. The daily round,
brightened only by a few unsatisfying, fleeting pleasures; the slow
passage of unchanging years; the encounter with some young man, like
other young men, whose patient and hopeful courting ends by whining
affection; a marriage then, and afterwards a vista of days under
another roof, but scarce different from those that went before. So
does one live, the voice had told her. Naught very dreadful in the
prospect, and, even were it so, what possible but submission; yet
all level, dreary and chill as an autumn field.

It is not true! Alone there in the darkness Maria shakes her head, a
smile upon her lips, and knows how far from true it is. When she
thinks of Paradis, his look, his bearing, of what they are and will
be to one another, he and she, something within her bosom has
strange power to burn with the touch of fire, and yet to make her
shiver. All the strong youth of her, the long-suffering of her
sooth-fast heart find place in it; in the upspringing of hope and of
longing, this vision of her approaching miracle of happiness.

Below the oven the red gleam quivers and fails.

"The bread must be ready!" she murmurs to herself. But she cannot
bring herself at once to rise, loth as she is to end the fair dream
that seems only beginning.

CHAPTER VII

A MEAGER REAPING

SEPTEMBER arrived, and the dryness so welcome for the hay-making
persisted till it became a disaster. According to the Chapdelaines,
never had the country been visited with such a drought as this, and
every day a fresh motive was suggested for the divine displeasure.

Oats and wheat took on a sickly colour ere attaining their growth; a
merciless sun withered the grass and the clover aftermath, and all
day long the famished cows stood lowing with their heads over the
fences. They had to be watched continually, for even the meager
standing crop was a sore temptation, and never a day went by but one
of them broke through the rails in the attempt to appease her hunger
among the grain.

Then, of a sudden one evening, as though weary of a constancy so
unusual, the wind shifted and in the morning came the rain. It fell
off and on for a week, and when it ceased and the wind hauled again
to the north-west, autumn had come.

The autumn! And it seemed as though spring were here