Then Martel made up to Rachel Carre, and their friendship turned to hatred, the more venomous for what had gone before.
But even George Hamon admits that Paul Martel was an unusually good-looking fellow, with very attractive manners when he chose, and a knowledge of the world and its ways, and of men and women, beyond the ordinary, and he won Rachel Carre's heart against her head and in the teeth of her father's opposition.
Perhaps if her mother had been alive things might have been different.

But she died when Rachel was eight years old, and her father was much away at the fishing, for the farm was poorer then than it became afterwards, and Martel found his opportunities and turned them to account.
I do not pretend to understand fully how it came about--beyond the fact that the little god of love goes about his work blindfold, and that women do the most unaccountable things at times.

Even in the most momentous matters they are capable of the most grievous mistakes, though, on the other hand, that same heart instinct also leads them at times to wisdom beyond the gauging of man's intelligence.

A man reasons and keeps tight hand on his feelings; a woman feels and knows; and sometimes a leap in the dark lands one safely, and sometimes not.
To make a long story short, however, Paul Martel and Rachel Carre were married, to the great surprise of all Rachel's friends and to the great grief of her father.
Martel built a little cottage at the head of the chasm which drops into Havre Gosselin, and her father, Philip Carre, lived lonely on his little farm of Belfontaine, by Port a la Jument, with no companion but his dumb man Krok.
Rachel seemed quite happy in her marriage.

There had been many predictions among the gossips as to its outcome, and sharp eyes were not lacking to detect the first signs of the fulfilment of prophecy, nor reasons for visits to the cottage at La Fregondee with a view to discovering them.