ssible that he could live. The _habitants_ find Dominique a queer
fellow, even as you do; and I have observed that even Mademoiselle
Diane treats him somewhat impatiently. But in truth he is a lad
grown old before his time. It is terrible when such a blow falls
upon the young. He and Bateese adored one another."

And this was all John learned at the time. But three days later he
heard more of the story, and from Mademoiselle Diane.

She was seated in an embrasure of the terrace--the same, in fact, in
which she had taken measurements for John's new tunic. She was
embroidering it now with the Bearnais badge, and had spread Barboux's
tunic on the gun-breach to give her the pattern. John, passing along
the terrace in a brown study, while his eyes followed the evolutions
of Sergeant Bedard's men at morning parade in the square below, did
not catch sight of her until she called to him to come and admire her
handiwork.

"Monsieur is _distrait_, it appears," she said, mischievously.
"It must be weary work for him, whiling away the hours in this
contemptible fortress?"

"I do not find Fort Amitie contemptible, mademoiselle."

She shook her head and laughed. "If you wish to please me, monsieur,
you must find some warmer praise for it. For in some sort it is my
ancestral home, and I love every stone of it."

"Mademoiselle speaks in riddles. I had thought that every one of the
Commandant's household--except the Commandant himself, perhaps--was
pining to get back to Boisveyrac."

She let her needlework lie for a moment, and sat with her eyes
resting on the facade of the Commandant's quarters across the square.

"It is foolish in me," she said musingly; "for in the days of which I
am thinking not one of these stones was laid. You must know,
monsieur, that in those days many and many a young man of family took
to the woods; no laws, no edicts would restrain them; the life of the
forest seemed to pass into their blood and they could not help
themselves . . . ah, I myself understand that, sometimes!" she added,
after a pause.

"Well, monsieur," she went on, "there came to Fort Amitie a certain
young Raoul de Tilly, who suffered from this wandering fever.
The Government outlawed him in the end; but as yet his family had
hopes to reclaim him, and, being powerful in New France, they managed
to get his sentence delayed. He came here, and here he fell in love
with an Indian girl, and married her--putting, they say, a