floors. Autumn came to the Laurentians. In the
morning the lake lay like a quicksilver pool under the rising mists,
through which the sun struck blinding flashes of light. A little later,
when the veil had lifted, it became a mirror for the hills and crags, the
blue reaches of the sky. The stinging air was spiced with balsam.
Revealed was the incredible brilliance of another day,--the arsenic-green
of the spruce, the red and gold of the maples, the yellow of the alders
bathing in the shallows, of the birches, whose white limbs could be seen
gleaming in the twilight of the thickets. Early, too early, the sun fell
down behind the serrated forest-edge of the western hill, a ball of
orange fire.... One evening Delphin and Herve, followed by two other
canoes, paddled up to the landing. New visitors had arrived, Dr. McLeod,
who had long been an intimate of the Wishart family, and with him a
buxom, fresh-complexioned Canadian woman, a trained nurse whom he had
brought from Toronto.

There, in nature's wilderness, Janet knew the supreme experience of
women, the agony, the renewal and joy symbolic of nature herself. When
the child was bathed and dressed in the clothes Augusta Maturin herself
had made for it, she brought it into the room to the mother.

"It's a daughter," she announced.

Janet regarded the child wistfully. "I hoped it would be a boy," she
said. "He would have had--a better chance." But she raised her arms, and
the child was laid in the bed beside her.

"We'll see that she has a chance, my dear," Augusta Maturin replied, as
she kissed her.

Ten days went by, Dr. McLeod lingered at Lac du Sablier, and Janet was
still in bed. Even in this life-giving air she did not seem to grow
stronger. Sometimes, when the child was sleeping in its basket on the
sunny porch, Mrs. Maturin read to her; but often when she was supposed to
rest, she lay gazing out of the open window into silver space listening
to the mocking laughter of the loons, watching the ducks flying across
the sky; or, as evening drew on, marking in the waters a steely angle
that grew and grew--the wake of a beaver swimming homeward in the
twilight. In the cold nights the timbers cracked to the frost, she heard
the owls calling to one another from the fastnesses of the forest, and
thought of life's inscrutable mystery. Then the child would be brought to
her. It was a strange, unimagined happiness she knew when she felt it
clutching at her breasts, at her he