added.

"She has had chance and will enough," said I boldly, "but what point of
morality is here?"

"The most vital--to you," he rejoined, flicking his handkerchief a
little, and drawling so that I could have stopped his mouth with my
hand. "Shall a hostage on parole make sketches of a fort and send them
to his friends, who in turn pass them on to a foolish general?"

"When one party to an Article of War brutally breaks his sworn promise,
shall the other be held to his?" I asked quietly.

I was glad that, at this moment, the Seigneur Duvarney entered, for
I could feel the air now growing colder about Madame his wife. He, at
least, was a good friend; but as I glanced at him, I saw his face was
troubled and his manner distant. He looked at Monsieur Doltaire a
moment steadily, stooped to his wife's hand, and then offered me his
own without a word; which done, he went to where his daughter stood. She
kissed him, and, as she did so, whispered something in his ear, to which
he nodded assent. I knew afterwards that she had asked him to keep me to
dinner with them.

Presently turning to Monsieur Doltaire, he said inquiringly, "You have a
squad of men outside my house, Doltaire?"

Doltaire nodded in a languid way, and answered, "An escort--for Captain
Moray--to the citadel."

I knew now, as he had said, that I was in the trap; that he had begun
the long sport which came near to giving me the white shroud of death,
as it turned white the hair upon my head ere I was thirty-two. Do I not
know, the indignities, the miseries I suffered, I owed mostly to him,
and that at the last he nearly robbed England of her greatest pride,
the taking of New France?--For chance sometimes lets humble men like
me balance the scales of fate; and I was humble enough in rank, if in
spirit always something above my place.

I was standing as he spoke these words, and I turned to him and said,
"Monsieur, I am at your service."

"I have sometimes wished," he said instantly, and with a courteous if
ironical gesture, "that you were in my service--that is, the King's."

I bowed as to a compliment, for I would not see the insolence, and I
retorted, "Would I could offer you a company in my Virginia regiment!"

"Delightful! delightful!" he rejoined. "I should make as good a Briton
as you a Frenchman, every whit."

I suppose he would have kept leading to such silly play, had I not
turned to Madame Duvarney and said, "I am most sorry that this mishap