"Ah! but I like the crowds," she exclaimed hastily, "and the glow and excitement of that brighter, fuller life, where people really live. It is so dull here,--the same commonplace faces, the tiresome routine of drill, the same blue sky, gray water, and green plains, to look upon day after day. Oh, but it is all so wearisome, and you cannot conceive how I have longed again for Montreal and the many little gaieties that brighten a woman's world. There are those here who have never known these happier things; their whole horizon of experience has been bounded by garrison palisades; but 'tis not so with me,--I tasted of the sweet wine once, when I was a girl, and the memory never leaves me." "Yet you are often happy?" "'Tis my nature, Monsieur, a legacy of my mother's people; but I am not always gay of heart when my lips smile." "And the coming of the French gallant has doubtless freshened your remembrance of the past?" I said, a trifle bitterly. "It has indeed," was her frank admission. "He represents a life we know so little about here on the far frontier. To you, with your code of border manliness, he may appear all affectation, mere shallow in sincerity; but to me, Captain de Croix represents his class, stands for the refinements of social order to which women can never be indifferent. Those were the happiest days of my life, Monsieur; and at Montreal he was only one among many." She was gazing out into the black void as she spoke, and the slowly clearing skies permitted the star-light to gleam in her dark eyes and reveal the soft contour of her cheek. "You do not understand that?" she questioned finally, as I failed to break the silence. "I have no such pleasant memory to look back upon," I answered; "yet I can feel, though possibly in a different way, your longing after better things." "You realize this sense of loneliness? this absence of all that makes life beautiful and worth the living?" "Perhaps not that,--for life, even here, is well worth living, and to my eyes the great sea yonder, and the dark forests, are of more interest than city streets. But in one sense I may enter into your meaning; my thought also is away from here,--it is with a home, scarcely less humble than are our present surroundings, yet it contains the one blessing worth striving after--love." "Love!" she echoed the unexpected word almost scornfully. "'Tis a phrase so lightly spoken that I scarce know what it may signify to you. You love some one then, Monsieur?" and she looked up at me curiously. "My mother, Mademoiselle." I saw the expression upon her face change instantly. "Your pardon," she exclaimed, hastily. "'Twas not the meaning I had thought. I know something of such love as that, and honor you for thus expressing it." "I have often wondered, since first we met, at your being here, seemingly alone, at this outermost post of the frontier. It seems a strange home for one of your refinement and evident delight in social life."