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thout paying you a visit. But, besides that, I have news to tell." "News?" Under the questioning eyes of the household he did not raise his eyes. "By your face I am afraid you have bad news." "Yes." With a start of fear the mother half rose. "Not about the boys?" "No, Madame Chapdelaine. Esdras and Da'Be are well, if that be God's pleasure. The word I bring is not of them-not of your own kin. It concerns a young man you know." Pausing a moment he spoke a name under his breath:--"Francois Paradis." His glance was lifted to Maria and as quickly fell, but she did not so much as see his look of honest distress. Deep stillness weighed upon the house-upon the whole universe. Everything alive and dead was breathlessly awaiting news of such dreadful moment-touching him that was for her the one man in all the world ... "This is what happened. You knew perhaps that he was foreman in a shanty above La Tuque, on the Vermilion River. About the middle of December he suddenly told the boss that he was going off to spend Christmas and New Year at Lake St. John-up here. The boss objected, naturally enough; for if the men take ten or fifteen days' leave right in the middle of the winter you might as well stop the work altogether. The boss did not wish him to go and said so plainly; but you know Francois-a man not be thwarted when a notion entered his head. He answered that he was set on going to the lake for the holidays, and that go he would. Then the boss let him have his way, afraid to lose a man useful beyond the common, and of such experience in the bush." Eutrope Gagnon was speaking with unusual ease, slowly, but without seeking words, as though his story had been shaped beforehand. Amid her overwhelming grief the thought flitted through Maria's heart:--"Francois wished to come here ... to me," and a fugitive joy touched it as a swallow in flight ruffles the water with his wing. "The shanty was not very far in the woods, only two days' journey from the Transcontinental which passes La Tuque. But as the luck was, something had happened to the line and the trains were not running. I heard all this through Johnny Niquette of St. Henri, who arrived from La Tuque two days ago." "Yes." "When Francois found that he could not take the train he burst into a laugh, and in that sort of a humour said that as it was a case of walking he would walk all the way-reaching the lake by following the rivers, first the Cro
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