o it happened. It is not true that the strongest love is the most
jealous. It is the lesser love, the love which receives more than it
gives, that lies open to the floating germs of mistrust and suspicion.
And so it was Prosper who began to have doubts whether Toinette
thought of him as much when he was away as when he was with her;
whether her gladness when he came home was not something that she put
on to fool him and humour him; whether her _badinage_ with the
commercial travellers (and especially with that good-looking Irishman,
Flaherty from Montreal, of whom the village gossips had much to say)
might not be more serious than it looked; whether--ah, well, you know,
when a man begins to follow fool thoughts like that, they carry him
pretty far astray in the wilderness.

Prosper was a good fellow with a touch of the prig in him. He was a
Catholic with a Puritan temperament and a Gallic imagination. The
idolatry of Toinette had, as a matter of fact, spoiled him a little;
it was so much that he weakly questioned the reality of it, as if it
were too good to be true. All the time he was in Ottawa and on the
journey those fool thoughts hobbled around him and misled him and made
him unhappy.

Meantime Toinette was toiling through the time of separation, with a
laugh for the store, and a sigh for the lonely house, and a prayer for
the church. Tired as she was at night, she did not sleep well, and
her dreams were troubled by aunty Bergeron's warning against loving
too much.

In the cold drab dawn of a March morning it seemed to her as if the
church bell had just stopped ringing as she awaked from a dream of
Prosper. She put on her clothes quickly and hurried out. The road was
deserted. In the snowy fields the little fir-trees stood out as black
as ink. Against the sky rose the gray-stone church like a fortress of
refuge.

But as she entered the door, instead of five or six well-known
neighbours, kneeling in the half-darkness, she saw that the church was
filled with a strange, thick, blinding radiance, like a mist of light.
Everything was blurred and confused in that luminous fog. There was
not a face to be seen. Yet she felt the presence of a vast
congregation all around her. There were movements in the mist. The
rustling of silks, the breath of rich and strange perfumes, a low
rattling as of hidden chains, came to her from every side. There were
voices of men and women, young and old, rough and delicate, hoarse and
sw