As Louise left the door she cast back a keen look of distress at her mistress. It was merely her protest against the snapping of the last shred which bound her to France. But Claire received it as the appeal of dependent to superior; and more, as the appeal of maid to maid. She unlatched a swinging pane no larger than her hand, hinged like a diminutive door in glass of the window overlooking the court. The glass was poor and distorted, and this appeared a loop-hole which the sisters provided for themselves through the scale-armor Canadian winters set upon their casement. “Poor child!” murmured Claire to the back of Louise Bibelot’s square cap as Louise trotted beside the gliding nun. She did not estimate the amount of impetus which Louise’s look gave to other impulses that may have been lurking in her mind. She arose and rebelled with the usual swiftness of her erratic nature. Scarcely had nun and bride-elect disappeared within the bazar when Claire Laval entered behind them. Mother Mary unconsciously escorted her betwixt rows of suitors and haggling damsels. Louise was to be placed in the upper hall among select young women. Benches were provided on which the girls sat, some laughing and whispering, others block-like as sphinxes, except that they moved their dark eyes among the offering husbands. Sturdy peasant girls they were, and all of them in demand, for they could work like oxen. If there was uniformity of appearance among them, the men presented contrast enough. Stout coureurs de bois were there, half-renegades, who had made the woods their home and the Indian their foster-brother; who had shirked the toils of agriculture and depended on rod and gun: loving lazy wigwam life and the dense balmy twilight of summer woods which steeped them in pale green air; loving the winter trapping, the forbidden beaver-skin, the tracking of moose; loving to surprise the secrets of the pines, to catch ground-hog or sable at lunch on cast-off moose-horns; loving to stand above their knees in boiling trout-streams to lure those angels of the water with well-cast hook as they lay dreaming in palpitating colors. Ever thus was the provincial government luring back to domestic life and agriculture the coureurs de bois themselves. They were paid bounties and made tenants on seigniories if they would take wives of the king’s girls and return to colonial civilization. Most of these young men retained marks of their wild life in Indian trinket, caribou moccasin, deerskin leggin, or eagle feathers fastened to their hats; not to speak of those marks of brief Indian marriages left on their memories. The habitant, or censitaire, the true cultivator of the soil, was a very different type. Groups from lower seigniories, from Cap Rouge and even from Three Rivers, shuffled about selecting partners. They had none of the audacity of their renegade brethren, and their decoration was less pronounced, yet they appeared to please the girls from France.