plenty of pleasure, too. And what is one to do here!"

"The Indians have some ball games. But they often fight at the end."

The lady laughed. What a charming ripple it was, like the falls here and there, and there were many of them.

"Not that kind," she said, in her soft tone that could not wound the child. "A great room like a palace, and lights everywhere, hundreds of candles, and mirrors where you see yourself 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 protégée 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 the window did not satisfy her, so she went out on the gallery. A French vessel was coming up into port, with its colors at half mast and its golden lilies shrouded with crape. Some important personage must be dead—was it the King?

She heard her husband's voice calling her and turned, took a few steps forward. "Oh, what has happened?" she cried.