f for a young man
who, after all is said, was nothing to you..."

And again: "That masses should be sung, that you should pray for
him, such things are useful and good, you could do no better. Three
high masses with music, and three more when the boys return from the
woods, as your father has asked me, most assuredly these will help
him, and also you may be certain they will delight him more than
your lamentations, since they will shorten by so much his time of
expiation. But to grieve like this, and to go about casting gloom
over the household is not well, nor is it pleasing in the sight of
God."

He did not appear in the guise of a comforter, nor of one who gives
counsel in the secret affairs of the heart, but rather as a man of
the law or a chemist who enunciates his bald formulas, invariable
and unfailing.

"The duty of a girl like you--good-looking, healthy, active withal
and a clever housewife--is in the first place to help her old
parents, and in good time to marry and bring up a Christian family
of her own. You have no call to the religious life? No. Then you
must give up torturing yourself in this fashion, because it is a
sacrilegious thing and unseemly, seeing that the young man was
nothing whatever to you. The good God knows what is best for us; we
should neither rebel nor complain ..."

In all this, but one phrase left Maria a little doubting, it was the
priest's assurance that Francois Paradis, in the place where now he
was, cared only for masses to repose his soul, and never at all for
the deep and tender regrets lingering behind him. This she could not
constrain herself to believe. Unable to think of him otherwise in
death than in life, she felt it must bring him something of
happiness and consolation that her sorrow was keeping alive their
ineffectual love for a little space beyond death. Yet, since the
priest had said it ...

The road wound its way among the trees rising sombrely from the
snow. Here and there a squirrel, alarmed by the swiftly passing
sleigh and the tinkling bells, sprang upon a trunk and scrambled
upward, clinging to the bark. From the gray sky a biting cold was
falling and the wind stung the cheek, for this was February, with
two long months of winter yet to come.

As Charles Eugene trotted along the beaten road, bearing the
travellers to their lonely house, Maria, in obedience to the words
of the cure at St. Henri, strove to drive away gloom and put
mourning from her; as si