Bittersweet Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #5): A Novel by Ruth Glover

probability that person could be sitting within sound of her voice at this very moment. Birdie’s hand went tentatively toward the violets blooming in lonely splendor on her hat brim, only to withdraw self-consciously and hastily. What if, indeed, he were watching? Birdie could feel the back of her neck reddening.
    And that wasn’t good, because as a rule, all unmarried men and boys sat in the back of the room on the benchlike supply cupboards running down the sides of that portion of the building, the cloakroom. Her mind, in spite of her best judgment, ran over the list: five or six young men, striplings only, too boyish to be interested in a woman pushing thirty; Herkimer Pinkard, he of the lumbering walk and the perceptively apropos comments— Oh, no, not Herkimer Pinkard! ; Jed and Jake West, brothers and homesteading together, supposedly awaiting the arrival of brides from back home; the widower D. Dunn— Oh, no, she could never abide being called B. Dunn! ... Birdie was running out of names. There was, of course—sitting up front where he had sat with his wife until her death a couple of years ago—Wilhelm “Big Tiny” Kruger.
    For the life of her Birdie couldn’t come up with any suitable suspect. Anyway, she told herself firmly, it’s a lot of foolishness. She was not about to meet some strange, quirky male in a place called, of all things, the Fairy Ring! Heaven forbid!
    And so, with an effort, she turned her attention to the preacher and his concluding remarks, a quote, he said, from the ninth chapter of Romans, verse twenty-five. “I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.”
    And the lonely, hurting heart of Birdie Wharton, wrenched from daydreaming too late, wished desperately that it had heard more.

M iss Wharton, my scribbler is full. I need a new one.”
    “Miss Wharton, my pencil is gone from my desk. It looks just like that one Buck is using, with the eraser sorta bit off.”
    “Miss Wharton... Miss Wharton...”
    Birdie stood at the front of the room, waiting for the children to settle down. They seemed noisier than usual this morning, restless, high-spirited. No doubt it was the beautiful day beckoning through the high windows, the gentle wafting of the bush’s enticement through the open door; they were half-wild with longing to be out in it. And no wonder. Winter had been long and dark and bitterly cold.
    Settling down, getting order, had been even more difficult in winter. Before school could open each morning, coats had to be removed, wet mittens laid under the stove to dry, overshoes unbuckled and set in a straight line below the hanging coats and caps and scarves. Then, shivering children, icy through and through, had needed a few moments at the side of the heater to hold cold hands out to its warmth, cheeks blazing red, first fromthe cold and then from the heat. Finally, reluctantly, they took their seats, gripping pencils with stiff fingers, giving attention, often lackadaisically, to their books. Not even the accounts of the coureurs de bois , those legendary runners of the woods, could bring history books alive in winter.
    It was one thing for a boy to dream in summer of wild rivers calling and far horizons beckoning, and an entirely different matter in winter. Winter was a time for shut doors, hot fires, warm meals.
    But there had been those who challenged winter: those intrepid, indomitable coureurs de bois .
    Montreal, so far to the east of them, at one time was considered to be the gateway to the West; beyond it stretched almost endless forest, the empire of the trader and the missionary. The lure of this vast green area was irresistible to young men, and hundreds of them in the nation’s early days made their way into its dark shadows. Gaily painted canoes carried them along, shouting their challenge to the wide skies, rowing with might and main up the sunlit waters and over swirling rapids; portages were accompanied by