he 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 heart, a happiness not
unmixed with yearning, with sadness