But Father Etienne speaks very good English. Heducate at Rome. I
am the only other educated man at Haha Bay. You don't 'appen to have
some papers in you' bag? French? English? It is the same!"

"Papers? No!" said Northwick, with horror and suspicion. "What is in the
papers?"

"That is what I like to find hout," said Bird, spreading his hands with
a shrug.

The outer door opened, and a young man in a priest's long robe came in.
Bird introduced his guest, and Northwick shook hands with the priest,
who had a smooth, regular face, with beautiful, innocent eyes, like a
girl's. He might have been twenty-eight or twenty-nine; he had the spare
figure of a man under thirty who leads an active life; his features were
refined by study and the thought of others. When he smiled the innocence
of his face was more than girlish, it was childlike. Points of light
danced in his large, soft, dark eyes; an effect of trusting, alluring
kindness came from his whole radiant visage.

Northwick felt its charm with a kind of fear. He shrank away from the
priest, and at the table he left the talk to him and his host. They
supped in a room opening into a sort of wing; beyond it was a small
kitchen, from which an elderly woman brought the dishes, and where that
girl whom he heard singing kept trilling away as if she were excited,
like a canary, by the sound of the frying meat.

Bird said, by way of introduction, that the woman was his niece; but he
did not waste time on her. He began to talk up his conjecture as to
Northwick's business with the priest, as if it were an ascertained fact.
Northwick fancied his advantage in leaving him to it. They discussed the
question of gold in the hills, which the young father treated as an old
story of faded interest, and Bird entered into with the fervor of fresh
excitement. The priest spoke of the poor return from the mines at
Chaudiere, but Bird claimed that it was different here. Northwick did
not say anything: he listened and watched them, as if they were a pair
of confidence-men trying to work him. The priest seemed to be anxious to
get the question off the personal ground into the region of the
abstract, and Northwick believed that this was part of his game, a ruse
to throw him from his guard, and commit him to something. He made up his
mind to get away as early as he could in the morning; he did not think
it was a safe place.

"Very well!" the priest cried, at one point. "Suppose you had the
capita