who toiled and worked and spent their very
lives in bearing comfort and hope, and a little touch of refinement too,
through all those wilds. More than once these wayfarers wished to have
speech with the fugitives, but they pushed onwards, disregarding their
signs and hails. From below nothing overtook them, for they paddled
from early morning until late at night, drawing up the canoe when they
halted, and building a fire of dry wood, for already the nip of the
coming winter was in the air.

It was not only the people and their dwellings which were stretched out
before the wondering eyes of the French girl as she sat day after day in
the stern of the canoe. Her husband and Amos Green taught her also to
take notice of the sights of the woodlands, and as they skirted the
bank, they pointed out a thousand things which her own senses would
never have discerned. Sometimes it was the furry face of a raccoon
peeping out from some tree-cleft, or an otter swimming under the
overhanging brushwood with the gleam of a white fish in its mouth.
Or, perhaps, it was the wild cat crouching along a branch with its
wicked yellow eyes fixed upon the squirrels which played at the farther
end, or else with a scuttle and rush the Canadian porcupine would thrust
its way among the yellow blossoms of the resin weed and the tangle of
the whortleberry bushes. She learned, too, to recognise the pert sharp
cry of the tiny chick-a-dee, the call of the blue-bird, and the flash of
its wings amid the foliage, the sweet chirpy note of the black and white
bobolink, and the long-drawn mewing of the cat-bird. On the breast of
the broad blue river, with Nature's sweet concert ever sounding from the
bank, and with every colour that artist could devise spread out before
her eyes on the foliage of the dying woods, the smile came back to her
lips, and her cheeks took a glow of health which France had never been
able to give. De Catinat saw the change in her, but her presence
weighed him down with fear, for he knew that while Nature had made these
woods a heaven, man had changed it into a hell, and that a nameless
horror lurked behind all the beauty of the fading leaves and of the
woodland flowers. Often as he lay at night beside the smouldering fire
upon his couch of spruce, and looked at the little figure muffled in the
blanket and slumbering peacefully by his side, he felt that he had no
right to expose her to such peril, and that in the morning they sho