little homely things of the post and the woods crept into her
heart, that seemed to her to be opening to a vague knowledge, to be
looking down sweet vistas of which she had never dreamed among her other
dreams of forest and lake and plain, and, at each distant focus where
appeared a new glory of light, there was always the figure of the young
factor with his anxious eyes. Strange new thrills raced hotly through
her heart and dyed her cheeks in the darkness. She tingled from head to
foot at the memory of that day in the glade, and for the first time in
her life she read the love-signs in a man. That change in his eyes when
he had looked upon De Courtenay's red flower was jealousy. With the
thought came a greater fulness of the unexplainable joy that had
flooded her all these days. Aye, verily, that red flower had caused him
pain,--him,--with his laughing blue eyes and his fair head tilted back
ever ready for mirth, with his tender mouth and his strong hands. The
very thought of that killed the joy of the other. If love was jealousy,
and jealousy was pain, the one must be healed for sake of the other.
With this girl to think was to do, and with that last discovery she was
upon her feet, straight and lithe as a young animal beside the door.
She would go to this man and tell him that the red flower was less than
nothing to her, its giver less than it.

At that moment a figure came out of the dusk and stopped before her.

It was her leader, Prix Laroux, silent, a shadow of the shadows.

"Maren," he said, in that deep confidence of trusted friends, "Maren, is
all well with you?"

"All is well, Prix," said the girl, her voice tremulous with pleasure,
"most assuredly. Thought you aught was wrong?"

"Nay,--only I felt the desire to know."

"Friend," said Maren, reaching out a hand which the man took strongly in
both his own; "good, good friend! Ever you are at my back."

"Where you may easily reach me when you will."

"I know. 'Tis you alone have made possible the long trail. Ah! how long
until another spring?"

But, when Prix had lounged away into the dusk and the girl had stepped
into the soft dust of the roadway, she fell to wondering how it was that
mention of the year's wait brought no longer its impatience, its old
dissatisfaction.

She was thinking of this as she neared the factory, her light tread
muffled in the dust.

"Foolish Francette! What should I do with a gay little girl like you?
Play in the sunshine