The wilderness, the calm, unfathomed wilderness, had
forgotten sorrow and carnage. We forgot, too.
I suddenly laughed as of old, and the sound did not jar. The woman on
my arm laughed with me. A thrush was singing. Life was before me, and
the woman of my love loved me. My blood tingled and I breathed deep.
The wood smoke--the smoke of the pathfinder's fire--pricked keen in my
nostrils.
I pointed the woman to the forest. "We shall come back to it," I
cried. "We leave it now, but we shall come back to it, some time,
somehow. Perhaps we shall be settlers, explorers. I do not know. But
we shall come back. This land belongs to us; to us and to our children
and our children's children. French or English, what will it matter
then? It will be a new race."
The woman turned. I heard her quick breath and saw the red flood her
from chin to brow. "A new race!" she repeated, and her eyes grew dark
with the splendor of the thought. She clasped her hands, and looked to
the west over the unmapped forest, and I knew that for the moment her
blood was pulsing, not for me, but for that unborn race which was to
hold this land. I had married a woman, yes, but also I had married a
poet and a dreamer and a will incarnate.
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