and a new red-silk cravat. They looked fine on Corpus Christi day,
when he and 'Toinette walked together as fiancee's.

You would have thought he would have been content with that. Proud,
he certainly was. He stepped like the cure's big rooster with the
topknot--almost as far up in the air as he did along the ground; and
he held his chin high, as if he liked to look at things over his nose.

But he was not satisfied all the way through. He thought more of
beating Prosper than of getting 'Toinette. And he was not quite
sure that he had beaten him yet.

Perhaps the girl still liked Prosper a little. Perhaps she still
thought of his romances, and his chansons, and his fine, smooth
words, and missed them. Perhaps she was too silent and dull
sometimes, when she walked with Raoul; and sometimes she laughed too
loud when he talked, more at him than with him. Perhaps those St.
Raymond fellows still remembered the way his head stuck out of that
cursed snow-drift, and joked about it, and said how clever and quick
the little Prosper was. Perhaps--ah, MAUDIT! a thousand times
perhaps! And only one way to settle them, the old way, the sure
way, and all the better now because 'Toinette must be on his side.
She must understand for sure that the bravest man in the parish had
chosen her.

That was the summer of the building of the grand stone tower of the
church. The men of Abbeville did it themselves, with their own
hands, for the glory of God. They were keen about that, and the
cure was the keenest of them all. No sharing of that glory with
workmen from Quebec, if you please! Abbeville was only forty years