[Pg 5]

A Daughter of the Forest

CHAPTER I

THE STORM

“Margot! Margot!”

Margot

Mother Angelique’s anxious call rang out over the water, once, twice, many times. But, though she shaded her brows with her hands and strained her keen ears to listen, there was no one visible and no response came back to her. So she climbed the hill again and, reëntering the cabin, began to stir with almost vicious energy the contents of a pot swinging in the wide fireplace. As she toiled she muttered and wagged her gray head with sage misgivings.

“For my soul! There is the ver’ bad hoorican’ a-comin’, and the child so heedless. But the signs, the omens! This same [Pg 6]day I did fall asleep at the knitting and waked a-smother. True, ’twas Meroude, the cat, crouched on my breast; yet what sent her save for a warning?”

[Pg 6]

Though even in her scolding the woman smiled, recalling how Margot had jeered at her superstition; and that when she had dropped her bit of looking-glass the girl had merrily congratulated her on the fact; since by so doing she had secured “two mirrors in which to behold such loveliness!”

“No, no, not so. Death lurks in a broken glass; or, at the best, must follow seven full years of bad luck and sorrow.”

On which had come the instant reproof:

“Silly Angelique! When there is no such thing as luck but all is of the will of God.”

The old nurse had frowned. The maid was too wise for her years. She talked too much with the master. It was not good for womenkind to listen to grave speech or plague their heads with graver books. Books, indeed, were for priests and doctors; [Pg 7]and, maybe, now and then, for men who could not live without them, like Master Hugh. She, Angelique, had never read a book in all her life. She never meant to do so. She had not even learned a single letter printed in their 

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