llandais who hath come out of the
west after her? Could she marry a priest or a common soldier?"

"That is true," admitted Zelie, feeling her superstition allayed.

"There must be as few women as trinkets in that wilderness Fort of
Orange from which he came," added the dwarf.

"Why?" inquired Zelie, wrinkling her nose and squinting in the sunlight.

But Le Rossignol took no further trouble than to give her a look of
contempt, and lifted the furred garment to descend the stairs.

X.

AN ACADIAN POET.

"The woman who dispenses with any dignity which should attend her
marriage, doth cheapen herself to her husband," said Lady Dorinda to
Antonia Bronck, leaning back in the easiest chair of the fortress. It
was large and stiff, but filled with cushions. Lady Dorinda's chamber
was the most comfortable one in Fort St. John. It was over the front of
the great hall, and was intended for a drawing-room, being spacious,
well warmed by a fireplace and lighted by windows looking into the fort.
A stately curtained bed, a toilet table with swinging mirror, bearing
many of the ornaments and beauty-helpers of an elderly belle, and
countless accumulations which spoke her former state in the world, made
this an English bower in a French fort.

Her dull yellow hair was coifed in the fashion of the early Stuarts. She
held a hand-screen betwixt her face and the fire, but the flush which
touched its usual sallowness was not caused by heat. A wedding was a
diversion of her exile which Lady Dorinda had never hoped for. There had
been some mating in the fort below among soldiers and peasant women, to
which she did not lower her thoughts. The noise of resulting
merrymakings sufficiently sought out and annoyed her ear. But the
wedding of the guest to a man of consequence in the Dutch colony was
something to which she might unbend herself.

Antonia had been brought against her will to consult with this faded
authority by Marie, who sat by, supporting her through the ordeal. There
was never any familiar chat between the lady of the fort and the widow
of Claude La Tour. Neither forgot their first meeting behind cannon, and
the tragedy of a divided house. Lady Dorinda lived in Acadia because she
could not well live elsewhere. And she secretly nursed a hope that in
her day the province would fall into English hands, her knight be
vindicated, and his son obliged to submit to a power he had defied to
the extremity of warring with a fathe