A Woodland Queen by André Theuriet

A steward's daughter, brought up in a forest lodge in the Argonne, comes into money and a mill, and two men want her — one for herself, one for the timber. Theuriet spent his boyhood in the forests of Lorraine and never really left them; the woodcutting, the sawmill and the seasons here are done by a man who had watched them all his life, and the forest is not scenery.