he approaching boat. A groan broke
suddenly from the only surviving _censitaire_.

"It is an Iroquois canoe!" he cried.

"Impossible!"

"Alas, your excellency, it is so, and it is the same one which passed us
last night."

"Ah, then the women have escaped them."

"I trust so. But alas, seigneur, I fear that there are more in the
canoe now than when they passed us."

The little group of survivors waited in breathless anxiety while the
canoe sped swiftly up the river, with a line of foam on either side of
her, and a long forked swirl in the waters behind. They could see that
she appeared to be very crowded, but they remembered that the wounded of
the other boat were aboard her. On she shot and on, until as she came
abreast of the fort she swung round, and the rowers raised their paddles
and burst into a shrill yell of derision. The stern of the canoe was
turned towards them now, and they saw that two women were seated in it.
Even at that distance there was no mistaking the sweet pale face or the
dark queenly one beside it. The one was Onega and the other was Adele.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

THE TWO SWIMMERS.

Charles de la Noue, Seigneur de Sainte Marie, was a hard and
self-contained man, but a groan and a bitter curse burst from him when
he saw his Indian wife in the hands of her kinsmen, from whom she could
hope for little mercy. Yet even now his old-fashioned courtesy to his
guest had made him turn to De Catinat with some words of sympathy, when
there was a clatter of wood, something darkened the light of the window,
and the young soldier was gone. Without a word he had lowered the
ladder and was clambering down it with frantic haste. Then as his feet
touched the ground he signalled to his comrades to draw it up again, and
dashing into the river he swam towards the canoe. Without arms and
without a plan he had but the one thought that his place was by the side
of his wife in this, the hour of her danger. Fate should bring him what
it brought her, and he swore to himself, as he clove a way with his
strong arms, that whether it were life or death they should still share
it together.

But there was another whose view of duty led him from safety into the
face of danger. All night the Franciscan had watched De Catinat as a
miser watches his treasure, filled with the thought that this heretic
was the one little seed which might spread and spread until it choked
the chosen vineyard of the Church. Now wh