ment, as the bride of Paul Vandeleur, she had assumed the position of a local queen. By what right? None whatever, except that she had been able to assume it.

"You admit that one ought to feel contented, do you not?" persisted the Curé, who at this moment felt eminently contented himself.

"But no, indeed," answered madame, softening the bold contradiction by a smile; "to me it seems not good to be too easily satisfied. To be content, par exemple, to live and die where one was born-like a mushroom-to know nothing of the big world, only one little corner! The people here, they are like the mouse that thinks its hole is the universe. They have no ambition."

"In that madame compliments her neighbours, though she does not mean it. Ambition made the angels to fall from heaven," observed the Curé.

His interlocutor gave a faint shrug to her shoulders.

"Ah! I know not what may be good for the angels," she said, "but for men without ambition, they grow no wiser, no richer, no greater, no different from generation to generation. Still water is stagnant."

Save by a dissentient shake of the head, M. le Curé made no rejoinder. He did not feel equal to an argument on this or any other subject with Madame Vandeleur. Moreover, he knew that she must always have the last word; so why not as well give it her sooner as later? Actuated by this reflection, he fell into discreet silence. As for the women, they had hardly comprehended the meaning of her remarks, and had accordingly no comment to make upon them, only that presently Annette summed up the impression left on her mind by the puzzling talk in these words:

"Ha! madame is clever. makes all the difference."

We are not clever, we others--that

CHAPTER II.

MADAME VANDELEUR'S FÊTE.

"MA TANTE, have you forgotten that the supper is now served? ” This inquiry, addressed to her a few seconds later by a brownskinned maiden of fourteen, produced an instantaneous effect upon Madame Marie Vandeleur. Recalling, with a perceptible start, her duties as hostess, that strange little woman brought back her dark eyes, which had begun to wander from point to point of the limited

landscape, in a wistful, uneasy fashion, familiar to her neighbours' observation, and which they might with justice have compared to that of a caged wild animal, only that they were not much given to the use of metaphor in their speech, and, moreover, none of them had ever seen a wild animal in a cage.

"Pardon a thousand pardons!" she exclaimed, smoothing a discontented pucker from her brow, and becoming in a moment all smiles and graciousness. "It was to summon you to supper that I came forth. M. le Curé, do me the honour to enter. Mère Crépin, you must sit out of the draught. . . . But where is Paul? Paul, attend now that everyone is comfortably placed."

"Yes, my angel; yes, yes!" responded her husband, bustling obediently forward, and proceeding, with great politeness, to bestow the guests around a long trestle table which groaned beneath its hospitable array of dishes.

In declaring that Madame Vandeleur was clever, Annette Jalbert had spoken no less than the truth. Madame certainly was cleverwith a cleverness quite independent of education, in the technical sense--although, in passing, it may be noted that she was also, to a certain extent, educated. At a village school in her native placeon the Beaufort Slopes, near Quebec-she had learned to read and write. These accomplishments were shared with her by no woman, and by but two men in her present location, to wit, the priest (though his command of a pen was more a question of faith than sight) and another individual, of whom more anon.

As a matter of course, such exceptional acquirements helped to give her distinction, but Madame's real vantage ground was of a more occult nature. Her claim to the supremacy she had assumed over her neighbours could not, it has been said, very easily be defined. One way, however, by which she managed to retain it, was palpable enough, i.e., she always did everything better than anyone else. In illustration of this fact, her supper this evening-(the meal, in modern parlance, would be described as a high tea)-was a triumph of culinary skill such as no other woman in the village would have dreamt of approaching.

"My dear, will you that I take the children upon my knee? There remains no place for them at table," appealed her husband, when all the guests were at length seated.

"No, my Paul." Madame's replies always came without hesitation. "I do not intend that the children sit at table. They will have their stools in the corner yonder, and Julie shall attend their wants. Take now your own place."

She patted, as she spoke, a rough pine-wood chair by her side, and Paul sank upon it without a word.

A huge, broad-chested fellow, thirty-five years of age, and over six feet in height, Paul Vandeleur possessed neither the sallow skin nor the dark hair common to French Canadians. On the contrary, his complexion was fair and ruddy, his hair light, and his eyes blue. Towering like a giant beside his frail little wife, he looked as though it would be easy for him to crush out her life with his iron fists. Nevertheless, as Marie knew, she could make him tremble by a glance of her eye. Like a tame bear she led him about-holding him with an iron chain-garlanded and hidden, however, for the most part, beneath flowers of affection.

But to compare Paul to a bear, even a tame one, seems in truth a little absurd. Certainly there was nothing bearish in his nature. A more gentle, simple soul never existed. Affectionate in disposition, obtuse of mind, and somewhat inert in his habits, he had nothing great about him but his person.

Such as he was, Paul, with the Curé and a lame old man, represented-if we except two specimens of the sex (the children above referred to) too small to count-the entire masculine element at this entertainment.

A sprinkling of youths, it is true, remained in the village, who had not been invited to madame's fête; but, for the able-bodied men, they were all absent.

Half of them-the greater half-had left the settlement several weeks ago for trading purposes, travelling down to Quebec and Montreal by river, and living during the journey in tents or huts built upon their rafts. The other half, who were expected to return by dusk, had gone this afternoon into the woods on a shooting expedition of sufficient importance to warrant a neglect even of Madame Vandeleur's birthday party. For only that morning it had been discovered that a herd of Caribou, or reindeer, were haunting a natural opening or glade in the forest some five miles distant, and as there was a magnificent buck amongst them, the opportunity for a shot was too valuable to be sacrificed to any social consideration.

This madame herself had readily admitted, although, to his great chagrin, she had kept her husband at home in his capacity as host.

The absence of their male relatives did not, however, appear to exercise any very depressing influence upon the spirits of the women. The clatter of tongues almost drowned that of knives and plates,

and the long low room, with its beam-crossed ceiling, reverberated to the cheerful uproar. But by-and-by, conversation began to flag, together with the capacity for further absorption, and the quietude of a comfortable repletion settled upon the guests. Then a few of them, marshalled by Paul and the Curé, went out to inspect, at the rear of the house, an addition to their host's live stock in the shape of two newly-born calves.

The rest of the women, having pushed back their benches from the table, produced simultaneously from the capacious pockets which adorned each of their striped home-spun gowns, a corresponding number of blue worsted stockings, in various stages of progress, and began to knit.

Marie, before taking up her own work (which, in accordance with her wonted affectation of singularity, would certainly not be knitting), was directing her husband's niece, Julie Nicaud, how to clear away the remains of the feast, when a small voice at her elbow said:

"Give me yet another piece of cake, my mother, for the little Claude."

Madame Vandeleur caught her petitioner in her arms, gave him a warm kiss, and set him again upon the ground before replying

"Thou shalt have another piece for thyself, my Louis, because it is thy birthday. But Claude has eaten enough."

"Mais, non!" faltered the child, looking with trouble instead of pleasure at the gift in his hand. "He loves sweet cake so dearly! At least permit that I divide it with him?"

"Well, well, take thy own way, little fool," assented his mother. "The child would give his head for the other to play with, I truly believe," she continued, addressing the group of women nearest her.

"Ah, mon Dieu, he is a little seraph! He is a child among a thousand!" protested one ready flatterer.

"Adorable!" ejaculated a second. "And how like his father he grows more like every day-though, if one may judge, he will never be so tall."

"I don't wish him to be so tall," returned madame-quite as though she had the ordering of that event in her own hands.

"It is singular, madame," observed another woman, "but the little Claude he resembles you more than your own boy. Perhaps it is that he has the eyes so dark and the figure so petit."

"I do not see that he resembles me at all," rejoined Marie, rather tartly; "naturally he is smaller than Louis, since he is nearly two years younger."

"True, true," acquiesced the other--afraid that her remark had not been altogether agreeable. "But, regardez donc, how he caresses the little one! With such tenderness, what a blessing he will be to madame through life!" A gracious inclination of the head was the only acknowledgment Madame Vandeleur vouchsafed to this prediction; and, for several minutes, she and her interlocutors regarded in silence the two children, who were seated together on a bearskin mat at some distance, wholly absorbed in each other and in the suitable division of their cake.

Five years of age to-day, little Louis was the first-born, and now only child, of Paul and Marie Vandeleur. Three other children had followed him: only, however, after some weeks, or months respectively, of puling existence, to be carried in succession to the churchyard.

Fair-haired and blue-eyed, like his father, this remaining olivebranch appeared, however, to be in the sturdiest health, and likely enough to live.

As for the other boy (alluded to as Claude), he was in no way related to the pair. Nevertheless he had now lived in their house for nine months, and had learned, in imitation of his devotedly attached playmate, to call Marie "mother."

About this child-a dark-eyed little urchin of three, all life and mischief-or, more correctly speaking, about this child's father, all the curiosity of the village centred. Hubert Henry Stephens was in many respects a greater, and, at all events, a much newer mystery to its inhabitants than Madame Vandeleur herself. She, madame, at least spoke their own language, and belonged to their own race. Her parents, as they knew from Paul, were-notwithstanding her inexplicable superiority-merely simple peasants like themselves. But this stranger who had come amongst them, although a subject of the same realm, was practically a foreigner.

To be sure, he spoke sufficient French to make himself understood, but it was with a strong English accent, and he made no secret of his nationality. Of other things, however, he made secrets. enough. For, when they had said that he was an Englishman, and when the men had opined (from a dim perception of difference between him and other Englishmen with whom they had come into contact on their summer journeys) that, despite his poverty, he belonged to the haute noblesse—they had got to the end of nearly all that could be said of him. The few additional facts whereof their senses and observation informed them were, that he was young, good-looking, and passionately fond of his child. But where he came from, who were his relatives, whether or not the