uebec; offer
to pay with your neck, then--"

"I will have my hour," said the woodsman, and started on.

"It's a pity," said Iberville to himself--"as fine a woodsman as Perrot,
too!"

CHAPTER III

THE FACE AT THE WINDOW

At the governor's table that night certain ladies and gentlemen
assembled to do the envoy honour. There came, too, a young gentleman,
son of a distinguished New Englander, his name George Gering, who was
now in New York for the first time. The truth is, his visit was to
Jessica, his old playmate, the mistress of his boyhood. Her father was
in England, her mother had been dead many years, and Colonel Nicholls
and his sister being kinsfolk, a whole twelvemonth ago she had been left
with them. Her father had thought at first to house her with his old
friend Edward Gering, but he loved the Cavalier-like tone of Colonel
Nicholls's household better than the less inspiriting air which Madam
Puritan Gering suffused about her home. Himself in early youth had felt
the austerity of a Cavalier father turned a Puritan on a sudden, and
he wished no such experience for his daughter. For all her abundancy of
life and feeling, he knew how plastic and impressionable she was, and he
dreaded to see that exaltation of her fresh spirit touched with gloom.
She was his only child, she had been little out of his sight, her
education had gone on under his own care, and, in so far as was possible
in a new land, he had surrounded her with gracious influences. He looked
forward to any definite separation (as marriage) with apprehension.
Perhaps one of the reasons why he chose Colonel Nicholls's house for her
home, was a fear lest George Gering should so impress her that she might
somehow change ere his return. And in those times brides of sixteen were
common as now they are rare.

She sat on the governor's left. All the brightness, the soft piquancy,
which Iberville knew, had returned; and he wondered--fortunate to know
that wonder so young--at her varying moods. She talked little, and most
with the governor; but her presence seemed pervasive, the aura in her
veins flowed from her eye and made an atmosphere that lighted even the
scarred and rather sulky faces of two officers of His Majesty near. They
had served with Nicholls in Spain, but not having eaten King Louis's
bread, eyed all Frenchmen askance, and were not needlessly courteous to
Iberville, whose achievements they could scarce appreciate, having done
no India