The embarkation had now to be pushed with a speed which wrought infinite confusion, for the weather had turned bitter, and it was not possible for women and children to long endure the cold of their dismantled homes. The big wagons, watched by us from our windows, went creaking and rattling down the frozen roads. Wailing women, frightened and wondering children, beds, chests, many-colored quilts, bright red and green chairs,—to us it looked as if all these were tumbled into a narrowing vortex and swept with a piteous indiscriminacy into one ship or the other. The orderly method with which the previous embarkings had been managed was now all thrown to the winds by the fierce necessity for haste. We in the chapel were not left long to watch the scene from the windows. While yet the main street of Grand Pré was dolorous with the tears of the women and children, the doors of our prison opened and names were called. I heeded them not; but the sound of my own name pierced my gloom; and I went out. In the tingling air I awoke a little, to gaze up the hill at the large house where Yvonne had lodged since the parsonage had been taken for a guard-house. No message came to me from those north windows. Then I turned, to find Marc at my side. “Courage, cousin mine,” he whispered. “We are not beaten yet. Better outside than in there. This much means freedom—and, once free, we’ll act.” “No, Marc, I’m not beaten,” I muttered. “But—it _looks_ as if I were.” “Chut, man!” said he crisply. “You couldn’t do a better thing to bring her to her senses than you are doing now.” It was but a few steps down to the lane, and there we found ourselves in a jumble of heaped carts and blue-skirted, weeping women. My head was paining me sorely—a numb ache that seemed to rise in the core of my brain. But I remember noting with a far-off commiseration the blubbered faces of the women, and their poor little solicitudes for this or that bit of household gear which, from time to time, would fall crashing to the ground from the hastily laden carts. I found spirit to wonder that the tears which had exhausted themselves over the farewell to fatherland and hearthside should break out afresh over the cracking of a gilded glass or the shattering of a blue and silver jug. The women’s lamentations in a little hardened me, so that my ears ignored them; but the wide-eyed terrors of the children, their questions unanswered, their whimpering at the cold that blued their hands, all this pierced me. Tears for the children’s sorrow gathered in my heart, till it was nigh to bursting; and this curbed passion of pity, I think, kept my sick body from collapse. It in some way threw me back from my own misery on to my old unroutable resolution. “I _will_ win!” I said in my heart, as we came down upon the wharf at the Gaspereau mouth. “Though there seems to be no more hope, there is life; and while there is life, I hold on.”