urself at every turn. Then festoons
of gauzy things that wave about, and flowers--not always real ones, they
fade so soon. And the men--there are officers and counts and marquises,
and their habiliments are--well, I can't describe them so you would
understand, but a hundred times finer than those of the Sieur de
Champlain. And the women--oh, if I had worn a ball dress yesterday, you
would have been speechless."

She laughed again gayly at the child's innocence. And just then Wanamee
came in with the broth.

"Madame Dubray's husband has come," nodding to the child.

"Yes, yesterday, just at night."

"He has great stores, they say. He is shrewd and means to make money.
But there will be no quiet now for weeks. And it will hardly be safe to
venture outside the palisades."

Jolette had been among the first converts, a prisoner taken in one of
the numerous Indian battles, rescued and saved from torture by the Sieur
himself, and though she had been a wife of one of the chiefs, she had
been beaten and treated like a slave. Champlain found her amenable to
the influences of civilization, and in some respects really superior to
the emigrants that had been sent over, though most of them were eagerly
seized upon as wives for the workmen. Frenchwomen were not anxious to
leave their native land.

Madame Giffard fed her small _protegee_ in a most dainty and enticing
manner. The little girl would have thought herself in an enchanted
country if she had known anything about enchantment. But most of the
stories she had heard were of Indian superstition, and so horrid she
never wanted to recur to them. Madame Dubray was much too busy to allow
her thoughts to run in fanciful channels, and really lacked any sort of
imagination.

After she had been fed she leaned back on the pillow again. Madame soon
sang her to sleep. The child was very much exhausted and in the quietude
of slumber looked like a bit of carving.

"Her eyelashes are splendid," thought her watcher, "and her lips have
pretty curves. There is something about her--she must have belonged to
gentle people. But she will grow coarse under that woman's training."

She sighed a little. Did she want the child, she wondered. If Laurent
could make a fortune here in this curious land where most of the
population seemed barbarians.

She drew from a work-bag a purse she was knitting of silken thread, and
worked as she watched the sleeping child. Once she rose, but the view
from t