brought her bunches of mosses for her flower-pots, the first budding
lilacs, and some maple-sugar made from the trees on Vadrome Mountain.
She remembered that when she was a girl at school, years ago--ten years
ago--Jo Portugais, then scarcely out of his teens, a cheerful, pleasant,
quick-tempered lad, had brought her bunches of the mountain-ash berry;
that once he had mended the broken runner of her sled; and yet another
time had sent her a birch-bark valentine at the convent, where it was
confiscated by the Mother Superior. Since those days he had become a
dark morose figure, living apart from men, never going to confession,
seldom going to Mass, unloving and unlovable.

There was only one other person in the parish more unloved. That was the
woman called Paulette Dubois, who lived in the little house at the outer
gate of the Manor. Paulette Dubois had a bad name in the parish--so bad
that all women shunned her, and few men noticed her. Yet no one could
say that at the present time she did not live a careful life, justifying,
so far as eye could see, the protection of the Seigneur, M. Rossignol,
a man of queer habits and queerer dress, a dabbler in physical science,
a devout Catholic, and a constant friend of the Cure. He it was who,
when an effort was made to drive Paulette out of the parish, had said
that she should not go unless she wished; that, having been born in
Chaudiere, she had a right to live there and die there; and if she had
sinned there, the parish was in some sense to blame. Though he had no
lodge-gates, and though the seigneury was but a great wide low-roofed
farmhouse, with an observatory, and a chimney-piece dating from the time
of Louis the Fourteenth, the Seigneur gave Paulette Dubois a little hut
at his outer gate, which had been there since the great Count Frontenac
visited Chaudiere. Probably Rosalie spoke to Paulette Dubois more often
than did any one else in the parish, but that was because the woman came
for little things at the shop, and asked for letters, and every week sent