But Père Dufresne was not content. “No, no, my child,” said he, “you must not be with the stranger. It is not well for thee, it is not well.” “But why not, _mon père_?” asked Diâne in surprise. “I like to be with him; I tell him many things; he knows so little of all this,” with a sweep of her hand toward the hills, the river and the sky, “and he is glad to know, very glad. Why should I not be with him to tell him?” Poor Père Dufresne stammered in embarrassment. Surely the Evil One was digging pitfalls and laying snares to entrap him, for never before had his work brought him such a problem as this, never before had one been so dear to him as Diâne, for she had touched the man-father in the priest, and it wrung his heart to say aught to change the child--“_ma petite pucelle_,” he called her in his thoughts. Why could she not have been like all the rest to him, and why need this stranger have come to St. Gregoire--St. Gregoire so little and almost lost away back of the hills? “He is English and perhaps a heretic,” he argued, hoping thus to avoid the difficulty. “I do not know that,” she answered doubtfully. “He signs the cross as I have told him. I will ask him.” And so Père Dufresne, tender-hearted old man that he was, left the matter, hoping--as so many a wiser man has done--that _le bon Dieu_ in His omnipotence would order the matter to his liking. In good time the engineers finished their work and went on, but the boy remained, for he was not of them. He had come for the fishing, the shooting, for the primitive life he might find; he might go or stay as he chose, and the unreckoning will of youth said, “I have found that which is good in my sight; I shall stop to enjoy.” Days are to youth what years are to age, and well might Père Dufresne be dismayed at the result of his indecision. Who shall say when boyhood goes and manhood comes? Who shall say, that minute love was not, this minute it is? Certain it was that the boy listened to Diâne’s half-savage, half-religious mysticism, charmed and absorbed. The old druid spirit, that had worshipped under the oak trees of Britain lived again in this son of an ancient soil, and in the reincarnation the boy became a man and loved this woman, unconsciously and naturally as the flower loves the sunlight, or the bird the freedom of the air. But when she was not with him, when he sat by his campfire with the darkness about him, he remembered that he was from beyond the hills; he saw his lady-mother and the ivy-grown walls of home, a home which would be prison to Diâne, a home in which he knew she could never have a place. Then he saw Diâne, saw the beauty of her eyes, heard the sweetness of her voice, above all felt the purity of her spirit; and it was Diâne of whom he dreamed. These musings by his campfire kept alive the man of convention, and he knew he must go down to the priest in the valley and claim this woman in the way decreed by man.