Marie had, but at the start of the great journey, married young Henri
Baptiste.

Marie was all for a home and some black-eyed babies, but she clung to
Maren as she had ever done,--and now, in her twenty-sixth year, Maren
had risen to the call as her father had done before her, and lifted her
face, rapt as some pagan Priestess', toward that mystic West,--bound
for the Land of the Whispering Hills, whence had come that old, vague
rumour, lured alike by love of the unknown and shy, unspoken longing
for the father whose heart must be the pattern of her own.

And in her train, swept together by that fire within her, touched into
flame by her ever-mounting hope, her courage, and her magnetism, went
that small band of men and women, all young, all of adventurous blood,
all daring the odds that let reluctantly a woman into the wilderness.

Yet it has been ever women who have conquered the wilderness, for until
they trod the trace the men had cut it still remained a wilderness.

So she leaned in the door of Marie's new home, this taut-strung Maren
Le Moyne, and gazed away above the rim of the budding forest, and her
spirit was as a chaffing steed held into quiet by a hand it knows its
master.

For a year she must endure the strain,--then, as the good God willed,
the leap forward, the wild breath in her nostrils, the forging into the
unknown.

"Ah, yes!" she said again, "it is the spring."