it was certainly
not because of sympathy with their God-reverencing faith and God-fearing
lives, nor from any liking for hardships or simplicity of habits. He had
gold enough, the stories say, to have bought all the land from the St.
Johns to the Connecticut if he had pleased; and he had servants and
horses and attire such as no governor in all the provinces could boast.
He built himself a fine house out of stone, and the life he led in it
was a scandal and a byword everywhere. For all that, there was not a man
to be found who had not a good word to say for Willan Blaycke, and not a
woman who did not look pleased and smile if he so much as spoke to her.
He was generous, with a generosity so princely that there were many who
said that he had no doubt come of some royal house. He gave away a farm
to-day, and another to-morrow, and thought nothing of it; and when
tenants came to him pleading that they were unable to pay their rent, he
was never known to haggle or insist.

Naturally, with such ways as these he made havoc of his estates, vast as
they were, and grew less and less rich year by year. However, there was
enough of his land to last several generations out; and if he had
married a decent woman for his wife, his posterity need never have
complained of him. But this was what Willan Blaycke did,--and it is as
much a mystery now as it doubtless was then, why he did it,--he married
Jeanne Dubois, the daughter of a low-bred and evil-disposed Frenchman
who kept a small inn on the Canadian frontier. Jeanne had a handsome but
wicked face. She stood always at the bar, and served every man who came;
and a great thing it was for the house, to be sure, that she had such
bold black eyes, red cheeks, and a tongue even bolder than her glances.
But there was not a farmer in all the north provinces who would have
taken her to wife, not one, for she bore none too good a name; and men's
speech about her, as soon as they had turned their backs and gone on
their journeys, was quite opposite to the gallant and flattering things
they said to her face in the bar. Some people said that Willan Blaycke
was drunk when he married Jeanne, that she took him unawares by means of
a base plot which her father and she had had in mind a long time. Others
said that he was sober enough when he did it, only that he was like one
out of his mind,--he sorrowed so for the loss of his only son, Willan,
whom he had in the beginning of that year sent back to Eng