After coming into intimate relations with Grace Gaston, and seeing in her those high qualities which pleased his manly heart, he was at once powerfully influenced. Everything tended to bring him more and more into a realization of her personality, and that made the result inevitable, so far as he was concerned. From their first meeting to their final parting he was affected. Such a feeling, whether love or friendship, is of a permanent character. He had interpreted it as meaning love. He had been powerfully moved by it. He had acted as the lover, and as the lover had at last come to her. As a result they both suffered, each in his and her own way, and were prevented in consequence from enjoying the full value which a friendship such as was possible to them would bestow. In the wilds of Alaska he felt the same powerful feelings which had moved him at Pierre Island. His experience gave it a different coloring in his life. There was no uncertainty in relation to it as regarded Grace Gaston. Time was needed to soften the effect of the disappointment upon his life, which had come through her. So he was glad that the work which he had in hand would require not a few years to accomplish.
Grace Gaston found in Marie the development of a womanhood of a pure and retiring nature. Her wonderfully sensitive heart demanded certain conditions to satisfy it. As she broke away from the ties of youth, a few years wrought great changes in her. She ever retained her shyness. A quiet retirement, except to those in whom she placed implicit faith, and a modesty which no state of her life could eradicate or alter, were ever the qualities to characterize her. In her everyday life she was strong of character and purpose. Warm of heart, and of firm hope, she grew to riper womanhood capable of any sacrifice for those of her intimate life. With her mental and moral growth was also the beauty of face and form which, never brilliant, was nevertheless of that high type which commands admiration and derives its strength from unaffected native loveliness. Her womanhood was of that pure quality seen only in the reposeful face and the half melancholy, languid relaxation of form utterly unconscious of itself.