Next winter I shall go to the shanties, taking a horse with me, and in the spring I shall bring back not less than two hundred dollars in my pocket.
Then, should you be willing to wait so long for me, would be the time ..." Maria was leaning against the door, a hand still upon the latch, her eyes turned away.

Eutrope Gagnon had just this and no more to offer her: after a year of waiting that she should become his wife, and live as now she was doing in another wooden house on another half-cleared farm ...

Should do the household work and the cooking, milk the cows, clean the stable when her man was away--labour in the fields perhaps, since she was strong and there would be but two of them ...

Should spend her evenings at the spinning-wheel or in patching old clothes ...

Now arid then in summer resting for half an hour, seated on the door-step, looking across their scant fields girt by the measureless frowning woods; or in winter thawing a little patch with her breath on the windowpane, dulled with frost, to watch the snow falling on the wintry earth and the forest ...