ance; and with Montcalm I could save it. Vaudreuil is a blunderer and
a fool; he has sold the country. But what ambition is that? New France
may come and go, and be forgotten, and you and I be none the worse.
There are other provinces to conquer. But for me there is only one
province, and I will lift my standard there, and build a grand chateau
of my happiness there. That is my hope, and that is why I come to
conquer it, and not the English. Let the English go--all save one, and
he must die. Already he is dead; he died to-day at the altar of the
cathedral--"

"No, no, no!" broke in Alixe, her voice low and firm.

"But yes," he said; "but yes, he is dead to you forever. The Church has
said so; the state says so; your people say so; race and all manner of
good custom say so; and I, who love you better--yes, a hundred times
better than he--say so."

She made a hasty, deprecating gesture with her hand. "Oh, carry this old
song elsewhere," she said, "for I am sick of it." There were now both
scorn and weariness in her tone.

He had a singular patience, and he resented nothing. "I understand," he
went on, "what it was sent your heart his way. He came to you when you
were yet a child, before you had learnt the first secret of life. He was
a captive, a prisoner, he had a wound got in fair fighting, and I will
do him the credit to say he was an honest man; he was no spy."

She looked up at him with a slight flush, almost of gratitude. "I know
that well," she returned. "I knew there was other cause than spying at
the base of all ill treatment of him. I know that you, you alone, kept
him prisoner here five long years."

"Not I; the Grande Marquise--for weighty reasons. You should not fret at
those five years, since it gave you what you have cherished so much,
a husband--after a fashion. But yet we will do him justice: he is an
honourable fighter, he has parts and graces of a rude order. But he will
never go far in life; he has no instincts and habits common with you; it
has been, so far, a compromise, founded upon the old-fashioned romance
of ill-used captive and soft-hearted maid; the compassion, too, of the
superior for the low, the free for the caged."

"Compassion such as your Excellency feels for me, no doubt," she said,
with a slow pride.

"You are caged, but you may be free," he rejoined meaningly.

"Yes, in the same market open to him, and at the same price of honour,"
she replied, with dignity.

"Will you not