tefulness for what we have received at your hands.
Therefore accept with my compliments this small gift, which, as you
say you have no cantine salope, must come most happily. Once more,
farewell."

The man set down the jug at McElroy's feet and strode toward the
landing. The master was turning more leisurely away with his uncovered
curls shining in the first level beams of morning, when he stopped and
looked past the portal within the stockade.

With a small brass kettle in her hand, Maren Le Moyne was coming down
the open way toward the well.

With a colossal coolness he forgot the presence of the factor and the
ready light began to sparkle in his blue eyes with every step of the
approaching girl. Swiftly he glanced to right and left, as if in search
of something, and meeting only the green slope of the shore, a growing
excitement flushed his face.

Suddenly he snatched from a crevice of the stockade a tiny crimson
flower which nodded, frail and fragrant, from its precarious foothold,
and sprang forward as she set her vessel on the well's stone wall.

Unsurpassed was the bow he swept her, this daring soldier of fortune,
to whose delicate nostrils the taking of chances was the breath of life,
and his smile was brilliant as the spring morning itself.

"A chance is a chance, Ma'amselle," he said winningly, "and who would
not risk its turning? For me,--I looked upon your face but now, and
behold! I must give you something, and this was all the moment offered."

With hand on heart he held forth the little flower.

"In memory of a passing stranger far from all beauty, wear it, I pray
you, this day in the dusk of that braid, just there above the temple.
Have I permission?"

He stepped near and lifted the crimson star, smiling down into the
astonished eyes of Maren Le Moyne, to whom no man in all her life had
ever spoken thus.

For a moment she stared at him, and her face was a field of fleeting
sensations. And then, slowly, the sparkle in his eyes lit her own, the
smile on his lips curled up the corners of her full red mouth, and the
charm of the moment, fresh and sweet as the new day, swept over her.

"A venturer,-you!" she said; "some kin we must surely be, M'sieu! 'Tis
granted."

She rested her hands on the kettle's rim, and bent forward her head,
wrapped round and round with its heavy braids, and with fingers deft as
a woman's Alfred de Courtenay placed the flower in a shining fold.

Somewhat lengthy was t