t might be said that each but bided the time. To her Law might as well
have been one of the corded Sulpician priests; and she to him, for all
he liked, one of the nuns of the Convent garden. What did it all mean;
where was it all to end? he asked himself a thousand times; and a
thousand times his mind failed him of any answer. He waited, watching
the great encampment disappear, first slowly, then swiftly and suddenly,
so that in a night the last of the lodges had gone and the last canoe
had left the shore. There remained only the hurrying flood of the St.
Lawrence, coming from the West.

The autumn came on. Early in November the ships would leave for France.
Yet before the beginning of November there came swiftly and sharply the
settlement of the questions which racked Law's mind. One morning Mary
Connynge was missing from the Convent, nor could any of the sisters, nor
the mother superior, explain how or when she had departed!

Yet, had there been close observers, there might have been seen a boat
dropping down the river on the early morning of that day. And at Quebec
there was later reported in the books of the intendant the shipping,
upon the good bark Dauphine, of Lieutenant Raoul de Ligny, sometime
officer of the regiment Carignan, formerly stationed in New France; with
him a lady recently from Montreal, known very well to Lieutenant de
Ligny and his family; and to be in his care _en voyage_ to France; the
name of said lady illegible upon the records, the spelling apparently
not having suited the clerk who wrote it, and then forgot it in the
press of other things.

Certain of the governor's household, as well as two or three _habitants_
from the lower town, witnessed the arrival of this lady, who came down
from Montreal. They saw her take boat for the bark Dauphine, one of the
last ships to go down the river that fall. Yes, it was easily to be
established. Dark, with singular, brown eyes, _petite_, yet not over
small, of good figure--assuredly so much could be said; for obviously
the king, kindly as he might feel toward the colony of New France, could
not send out, among the young women supplied to the colonists as wives,
very many such demoiselles as this; otherwise assuredly all France
would have followed the king's ships to the St. Lawrence.

John Law, a grave and saddened man, yet one now no longer lacking in
decision, stood alone one day at the parapet of the great rock of
Quebec, gazing down the broad expan