let Woman had
made an impression. The Intendant's men essayed to trace these noises,
but found no one. Looking again to the Heights, I saw that the woman had
gone. Doltaire noted my glance and the inquiry in my face, and he said:

"Some bad fighting hours with the Intendant at Chateau Bigot, and then a
fever, bringing a kind of madness: so the story creeps about, as told by
Bigot's enemies."

Just at this point I felt a man hustle me as he passed. One of the
soldiers made a thrust at him, and he turned round. I caught his eye,
and it flashed something to me. It was Voban the barber, who had shaved
me every day for months when I first came, while my arm was stiff from
a wound got fighting the French on the Ohio. It was quite a year since
I had met him, and I was struck by the change in his face. It had grown
much older; its roundness was gone. We had had many a talk together; he
helping me with French, I listening to the tales of his early life in
France, and to the later tale of a humble love, and of the home which
he was fitting up for his Mathilde, a peasant girl of much beauty, I
was told, but whom I had never seen. I remembered at that moment, as he
stood in the crowd looking at me, the piles of linen which he had bought
at Ste. Anne de Beaupre, and the silver pitcher which his grandfather
had got from the Duc de Valois for an act of merit. Many a time we had
discussed the pitcher and the deed, and fingered the linen, now talking
in French, now in English; for in France, years before, he had been a
valet to an English officer at King Louis's court. But my surprise had
been great when I learned that this English gentleman was no other than
the best friend I ever had, next to my parents and my grandfather. Voban
was bound to Sir John Godric by as strong ties of affection as I. What
was more, by a secret letter I had sent to George Washington, who was
then as good a Briton as myself, I had been able to have my barber's
young brother, a prisoner of war, set free.

I felt that he had something to say to me. But he turned away and
disappeared among the crowd. I might have had some clue if I had known
that he had been crouched behind the Intendant's carriage while I was
being bidden to the supper. I did not guess then that there was anything
between him and the Scarlet Woman who railed at Bigot.

In a little while I was at my lodgings, soldiers posted at my door and
one in my room. Doltaire gone to his own quarters prom