low where women love to nestle ornaments, hung the
cross of her rosary, which she wore twisted about her neck. The
beads were large and white, and the cross was ivory. Father Petit had
furnished them, blessed for their purpose, to his incipient abbess,
but Saint-Castin noticed how they set off the dark rosiness of her
skin. The collar of her fur dress was pushed back, for the day was
warm, like an autumn day when there is no wind. A luminous smoke which
magnified the light hung between treetops and zenith. The nakedness of
the swelling forest let heaven come strangely close to the ground. It
was like standing on a mountain plateau in a gray dazzle of clouds.

Madockawando's daughter dipped her pail full of the clear water. The
appreciative motion of her eyelashes and the placid lines of her face
told how she enjoyed the limpid plaything. But Saint-Castin understood
well that she had not come out to boil sap entirely for the love of
it. Father Petit believed the time was ripe for her ministry to the
Abenaqui women. He had intimated to the seignior what land might be
convenient for the location of a convent. The community was now to
be drawn around her. Other girls must take vows when she did. Some
half-covered children, who stalked her wherever she went, stood like
terra-cotta images at a distance and waited for her next movement.

The girl had just finished her dipping when she looked up and met the
steady gaze of Saint-Castin. He was in an anguish of dread that she
would run. But her startled eyes held his image while three changes
passed over her,--terror and recognition and disapproval. He stepped
more into view, a white-and-gold apparition, which scattered the
Abenaqui children to their mothers' camp-fires.

"I am Saint-Castin," he said.

"Yes, I have many times seen you, sagamore."

Her voice, shaken a little by her heart, was modulated to such
softness that the liquid gutturals gave him a distinct new pleasure.

"I want to ask your pardon for my friend's rudeness, when you warmed
and fed us in your lodge."

"I did not listen to him." Her fingers sought the cross on her
neck. She seemed to threaten a prayer which might stop her ears to
Saint-Castin.

"He meant no discourtesy. If you knew his good heart, you would like
him."

"I do not like men." She made a calm statement of her peculiar tastes.

"Why?" inquired Saint-Castin.

Madockawando's daughter summoned her reasons from distant vistas of
the wood