t
in his hand swept the logs of the floor, he seized the woman's toil-hard
fingers and bore them to his lips.

"Excellent, Madame, was that meal," he murmured, "and never to be forgot
so long as one unused to hardship faces privation. I thank you."

Comely Rette flushed to her sleek hair and some flicker of a girlhood
that had its modicum of grace, flared up in the swift curtsy with which
she acknowledged the compliment.

And with a last flash of his blue coat Alfred de Courtenay was gone.

McElroy ran his fingers helplessly through his tousled light hair and
faced his friend.

"Now, by all the Saints!" he said with a strange mixture of regret and
relief, "what an unhappy ending!"

But at that moment he was thinking of the wondrous beauty of the man and
of the picture of Maren Le Moyne's brown arms spread wide apart with the
laughing child between, and again that little feeling of vexation crept
into his wholesome heart.

Without in the soft night the late guest was striding, a graceful
figure, hurriedly down toward the gate he had entered so short a time
ago, and his slender hand played restlessly at his hip. His heart was
seething with swift-roused emotions. So had its quick stirrings brought
him into many a scrape in his eventful life. That word of his host,
"which speaks almost of foes," sang in his ears.

And yet it had been given only in the spirit of enlightenment.

Behind, John Ivrey gathered up the men idling about the fire and talking
with the men of the post, where question and answer had begun to stir
uneasiness.

In a ragged, uneven line they strung out, fading into the darkness, and
presently from down the river some forty rods there rose up the columns
of their fires.

Fort de Seviere closed its gates and settled into the night with a
feeling of something gone awry.

By morning all was early astir, those within to witness the departure of
the strangers, and, those without for that same departure.

The canoes were floated, the men embarked, and all in readiness with the
first flame of the sun above the eastern forest when Alfred de Courtenay
presented himself at the gate and called for McElroy.

Gladly the factor responded, hoping somewhat to soften the awkwardness
of the situation by a godspeed, to be met by the Frenchman high-headed
and most carefully polite. A servant beside him held a wickered jug.

"With your leave, M'sieu," said De Courtenay, "I wish to leave some
earnest of my gra