Recent events had awakened with intense force the passion which had been slumbering at the bottom of her heart. Now that she was near him, that she heard, at every instant, his praises from the mouth of his mother, or from those of his companions, she had come to consider her love as forming part of her existence, she could not comprehend how she could have lived so long without loving this man, whom it appeared she must have known from her very birth. She no longer lived but for him and by him; happy at a look or a smile, joyful when she saw him, sad when he remained long absent from her. Loyal Heart had arrived at the same result by a very different route. Brought up, so to say, in the prairies, face to face with the Divinity, he was accustomed to adore in the great works he had constantly before his eyes, the sublime spectacles of nature; the incessant struggles he had to sustain, whether against Indians or wild beasts, had developed him, morally and physically, in immense proportions. As, by his muscular strength and his skill with his weapons, he had overcome all obstacles that had been opposed to him; so, by the grandeur of his ideas and the delicacy of his sentiments, he was capable of comprehending all things. Nothing that was good and nothing that was great seemed to be unknown to him. As it always happens with superior organisations early placed at war with adversity, and given up without other defences than themselves to the terrible chances of life, his mind had developed itself in gigantic proportions, still remaining in strange unconsciousness of certain sensations, which were unknown to him, and would always have remained so, but for a providential chance. The daily wants of the agitated and precarious life he led, had stifled within him the germ of the passions; his solitary habits had, unknown to himself, led him to a taste for a contemplative life. Knowing no other woman but his mother, for the Indians, by their manners, inspired him with nothing but disgust, he had reached the age of six-and-thirty without thinking of love, without knowing what it was, and, what is more, without ever having heard pronounced that word which contains so many things in its four letters, and which, in this world, is the source of so many sublime devotions and so many horrible crimes. After a long day's hunting through woods and ravines, or after having been engaged fifteen or sixteen hours in trapping beavers, when, in the evening, they met in the prairie at their bivouac fire, the conversation of Loyal Heart and his friend Belhumeur, who was as ignorant as himself in this respect, could not possibly turn upon anything but the events of the day.