answered by a movement of the head. They both stood gazing for
a time at the motionless figure under the woollen blankets, giving
ear to the sounds of distress; then Tit'Be departed to his small
outdoor duties. When Maria had put the house in order she took up
her patient watching, and the sick woman's agonizing wails seemed to
reproach her.

From hour to hour she kept reckoning the times and the distances.
"My father should not be far from St. Coeur de Marie ... If the
doctor is there they will rest the horse for a couple of hours and
come back together. But the roads must be very bad; at this time, in
the spring, they are sometimes hardly passable."

And then a little later:--"They should have left; perhaps in
going through La Pipe they will stop to speak to the cure; perhaps
again he may have started as soon as he heard, without waiting for
them. In that case he might be here at any moment."

But the fall of night brought no one, and it was only about seven
o'clock that the sound of sleigh-bells was heard, and her father and
the doctor arrived. The latter came into the house alone, put his
bag on the table and began to pull off his overcoat, grumbling all
the while.

"With the roads in this condition," said he, "it is no small affair
to get about and visit the sick. And as for you folk, you seem to
have hidden yourselves as far in the woods as you could. Great
Heavens! You might very well all die without a soul coming to help
you."

After warming himself for a little while at the stove he approached
the bedside. "Well, good mother, so we have taken the notion to be
sick, just like people who have money to spend on such things!"

But after a brief examination he ceased to jest, saying:--"She
really is sick, I do believe."

It was with no affectation that he spoke in the fashion of the
peasantry; his grandfather and his father were tillers of the soil,
and he had gone straight from the farm to study medicine in Quebec,
amongst other young fellows for the most part like himself--grandsons,
if not sons of farmers--who had all clung to the plain country manner
and the deliberate speech of their fathers. He was tall and heavily
built, with a grizzled moustache, and his large face wore the
slightly aggrieved expression of one whose native cheerfulness is
being continually dashed through listening to the tale of others'
ills for which he is bound to show a decent sympathy.

Chapdelaine came in when he had unharnes