Jeanne flushed. She was not without a sense of shame. Her love for Victorine made her sensitive to the stain on her birth. "Thinkest thou it could ever be known?" she asked anxiously. "Never," replied her father,--"never; 'tis as safe as if we were all dead. And for that, the living are safer than the dead, if there be tight enough lock on their mouths." "He doth seem to be as much in love as one need," said Jeanne. "Ay," said Victor, "more than ever his father was with thee." "Canst thou not let that alone?" said Jeanne, angrily. "Surely it is long enough gone by, and small profit came of it." "Not so, not so, daughter," replied Victor, soothingly; "if we can but set the girl in thy shoes, thou didst not wear thine for nought, even though they pinched thee for a time." "That they did," retorted Jeanne; "it gives me a cramp now but to remember them." Willan and Victorine galloped merrily along the river road. The woods were sweet with spring fragrances; great thickets of dogwood trees were white with flowers; mossy hillocks along the roadside were pink with the dainty bells of the Linnaea. The road was little more than a woodman's path, and curved now right, now left, in seeming caprice; now forded a stream, now came out into a cleared field, again plunged back into dense groves of larch and pine. "Never knew I that the woods were so beautiful thus early in the year," said the honest Willan. "Nor I, till to-day," said the artful Victorine, who knew well enough what Willan did not know himself. "Dost thou ride here alone?" asked Willan. "It is a wild place for thee to be alone." "If I came not alone, I could not come at all," replied Victorine, sorrowfully. "My grandfather is too busy, and my aunt likes not to ride except she must, on a market day or to go to church. No one but thou hast ever walked or ridden with me," she added in a low voice, sighing; "and now after two days or three thou wilt be gone." Willan sighed also, but did not speak. The words, "I will always ride by thy side, Victorine," were on his lips, but he felt himself still withheld from speaking them.