e of the Aves mounted.

Little Alma Rose, asleep on her father's knee, was undressed and put
to bed; Telesphore followed; Tit'Be arose in turn, stretched
himself, and fined the stove with green birch logs; the father made
a last trip to the stable and came back running, saying that the
cold was increasing. Soon all had retired, save Maria.

"You won't forget to put out the lamp?"

"No, father."

Forthwith she quenched the light, preferring it so, and seated
herself again by the window to repeat the last Aves. When she had
finished, a scruple assailed her, and a fear lest she had erred in
the reckoning, because it had not always been possible to count the
beads of her rosary. Out of prudence she recited yet another fifty
and then was silent-jaded, weary, but full of happy confidence, as
though the moment had brought her a promise inviolable.

The world outside was lit; wrapped in that frore splendour which the
night unrolls over lands of snow when the sky is clear and the moon
is shining. Within the house was darkness, and it seemed that wood
and field had illumined themselves to signal the coming of the holy
hour.

"The thousand Aves have been said," murmured Maria to herself, "but
I have not yet asked for anything ... not in words." She bad
thought that perhaps it were not needful; that the Divinity might
understand without hearing wishes shaped by lips--Mary above all ...
Who had been a woman upon earth. But at the last her simple mind
was taken with a doubt, and she tried to find speech for the favour
she was seeking.

Francois Paradis ... Most surely it concerns Francois Paradis.
Hast Thou already guessed it, O Mary, full of grace? How might she
frame this her desire without impiety? That he should be spared
hardship in the woods ... That he should be true to his word and
give up drinking and swearing ... That he return in the spring.

That he return in the spring ... She goes no further, for it seems
to her that when he is with her again, his promise kept, all the
happiness in the world must be within their reach, unaided ...
almost unaided ... If it be not presumptuous so to think ...

That he return in the spring ... Dreaming of his return, of
Francois, the handsome sunburnt face turned to hers, Maria forgets
all else, and looks long with unseeing eyes at the snow-covered
ground which the moonlight has turned into a glittering fabric of
ivory and mother-of-pearl-at the black pattern of the fences
out