BETRAYING in her face some disposition to pry into the customs of the New World, Claire inquired:

“What is this marriage market like, reverend mother?”

“It is too much like an unholy fair,” answered Mother Mary of the Incarnation, with mild severity. “The gallants stalk about and gaze when they should be closing contracts. The girls clatter with their tongues; they seem not to know what a charm lies in silence.”

Mademoiselle Laval stood up and closed her cloak.

“With your permission, reverend mother, I will walk through the fair with you.”

“Not you, mademoiselle!”

“Why not?”

“You are not here to select a husband. The holy cloister is thy shelter. Common soldiers and peasant farmers are not the sights for thee to meet.”

“Reverend mother, I must inure myself to the rough aspect of things in New France, for it is probable I am tossed here to stay. You and Madame Bourdon gaze upon these evil things, and my poor Louise is exposed to them.”

“I do not say they are evil. I only say they are not befitting thee.”

“Dear and reverend mother,” urged Claire, with a cajoling lift of the chin and a cooing of the voice which had been effective with other abbesses, “when the nausea was so great on shipboard and poor Louise nursed me so well, I did not think to turn my back on her in her most trying ordeal.”

“We will say nothing more, mademoiselle,” replied Mother Mary, shaking her black-bound head. “Without orders from his reverence the vicar, I should never think of taking thee into the marriage market.” She went directly away with Louise Bibelot.

As Louise left the door she cast back a keen look of distress at her mistress. It was merely her protest against the snapping of the last shred which bound her to France. But Claire received it as the appeal of dependent to superior; and more, as the appeal of maid to maid. She unlatched a swinging pane no larger than her hand, hinged like a diminutive door in glass of the window overlooking the court. The glass was poor and distorted, and this appeared a loop-hole which the sisters provided for themselves through the scale-armor Canadian winters set upon their casement.

“Poor child!” murmured Claire to the back of Louise Bibelot’s square cap as Louise trotted beside the gliding nun. She did not estimate the amount of impetus which Louise’s look gave to other impulses that may have been lurking in her mind. She arose and rebelled with the usual swiftness of her erratic nature.

Scarcely had nun and bride-elect disappeared within the bazar when Claire Laval entered behind them. Mother Mary unconsciously escorted her betwixt rows of suitors and haggling damsels. Louise was to be placed in the upper hall among select young women.

Benches were provided on which the girls sat, some laughing and whispering, others block-like as sphinxes, except that they moved their dark eyes among the offering husbands. Sturdy peasant girls they were, and all of them in demand, for they could work like oxen. If there was uniformity of appearance among them, the men presented contrast enough.

Stout coureurs de bois were there, half-renegades, who had made the woods their home and the Indian their foster-brother; who had shirked the toils of agriculture and depended on rod and gun: loving lazy wigwam life and the dense balmy twilight of summer woods which steeped them in pale green air; loving the winter trapping, the forbidden beaver-skin, the tracking of moose; loving to surprise the secrets of the pines, to catch ground-hog or sable at lunch on cast-off moose-horns; loving to stand above their knees in boiling trout-streams to lure those angels of the water with well-cast hook as they lay dreaming in palpitating colors.

Ever thus was the provincial government luring back to domestic life and agriculture the coureurs de bois themselves. They were paid bounties and made tenants on seigniories if they would take wives of the king’s girls and return to colonial civilization. Most of these young men retained marks of their wild life in Indian trinket, caribou moccasin, deerskin leggin, or eagle feathers fastened to their hats; not to speak of those marks of brief Indian marriages left on their memories.

The habitant, or censitaire, the true cultivator of the soil, was a very different type. Groups from lower seigniories, from Cap Rouge and even from Three Rivers, shuffled about selecting partners. They had none of the audacity of their renegade brethren, and their decoration was less pronounced, yet they appeared to please the girls from France.

The most successful wooers among these two or three hundred wife-seekers, however, were soldiers holding grants under their former officers. They pushed ahead of the slow habitant, and held their rights above the rights of any bush-ranger. Their minds were made up at a glance, and their proposals followed with military directness. So prompt and brief were their measures that couples were formed in a line for a march to the altar. Thirty at a time were paired and mustered upon the world by notary and priest.

The notary had his small table, his ink-horn and quills, his books, papers, and assistant scrivener, in an angle of the lower hall. To find the priest it was necessary to open a door into a temporary chapel created in one of those closet-like offshoots which people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries dignified by the name of rooms. Here fifteen pairs at a time were packed, their breath making a perceptible cloud in the chill, stone-inclosed air as the long ceremony proceeded.

Madame Bourdon rustled from upper to lower hall, repeating instructions to her charges. They were not forced to accept any offer which did not please them. They might question a suitor. And in some cases their questioning seemed exhaustive; for though a sacred propriety radiated throughout the bazar from nun and matron, here and there a young man sat on a bench beside a damsel, holding her hand and pressing it and his suit.

The sun penetrated dust and cobweb on narrow high windows, finding through one a stone fire-place and wasting the light of several logs which lay piled in stages of roseate coals and sap-sobbing wood-rind.

Madame Bourdon encountered Claire with surprise; but as she followed Mother Mary, it was evident that the abbess sanctioned her presence, so nothing was to be said on the subject. In all that buzz and trampling the abbess could not hear her demoiselle’s silken step, and she was herself a woman who never turned gazing about, but kept her modest eyes cast down as she advanced.

The instant that Claire entered this lower hall she recoiled, feeling degraded in the results of her disobedience. She shaded her face. But the pride and stubbornness of her blood held her to her ground, though from mouth to mouth flew a whispered sentence, and she heard it, comprehending how current tattle was misrepresenting her in New France.

“The king’s demoiselle! V’lÀ! See you? There she goes to choose her husband—the king’s demoiselle!”