erries in the woods."

"Your humility hurts me, monsieur. On the Acadian borders we have bitter
enmities, but the fort of La Tour shelters all faiths alike. We can
hardly atone to so good a man for having thrust him into our keep."

Father Jogues shook his head, and put aside this apology with a gesture.
The queen of France had knelt and kissed his mutilated hands, and the
courtiers of Louis had praised his martyrdom. But such ordeals of
compliment were harder for him to endure than the teeth and knives of
the Mohawks.

As soon as Le Rossignol saw the platters appearing, she carried her
mandolin to the lowest stair step and sat down to play: a quaint
minstrel, holding an instrument almost as large as herself. That part of
the household who lingered in the rooms above owned this accustomed
signal and appeared on the stairs: Antonia Bronck, still disturbed by
the small skeleton she had seen Zelie dressing for its grave; and an
elderly woman of great bulk and majesty, with sallow hair and face, who
wore, enlarged, one of the court gowns which her sovereign, the queen
of England, had often praised. Le Rossignol followed these two ladies
across the hall, alternately aping the girlish motion of Antonia and her
elder's massive progress. She considered the Dutch gentlewoman a sweet
interloper who might, on occasions, be pardoned; but Lady Dorinda was
the natural antagonist of the dwarf in Fort St. John. Marie herself
seated her mother-in-law, with the graceful deference of youth to middle
age and of present power to decayed grandeur. Lady Dorinda was not easy
to make comfortable. The New World was hardly her sphere. In earlier
life, she had learned in the school of the royal Stuarts that some
people are, by divine right, immeasurably better than others,--and
experience had thrust her down among those unfortunate others.

Seeing there were strange men in the hall, Antonia divined that the
prisoners from the keep had been brought up to supper. But Lady Dorinda
settled her chin upon her necklace, and sighed a large sigh that
priests and rough men-at-arms should weary eyes once used to revel in
court pageantry. She looked up at the portrait of her dead husband,
which hung on the wall. He had been created the first knight of Acadia;
and though this honor came from her king, and his son refused to inherit
it after him, Lady Dorinda believed that only the misfortunes of the La
Tours had prevented her being a colonial queen.

"Our