wn his long Dutch pipe. He
would also have seen that Iberville was smoking with deliberation, and
drinking with a kind of mannered coolness. Gering's face was flushed,
his fine nostrils were swelling viciously, his teeth showed white
against his red lips, and his eyes glinted. There was a kind of devilry
at Iberville's large and sensuous mouth, but his eyes were steady and
provoking, and while Gering's words went forth pantingly, Iberville's
were slow and concise, and chosen with the certainty of a lapidary.

It is hard to tell which had started the quarrel, but an edge was
on their talk from the beginning. Gering had been moved by a boyish
jealousy; Iberville, who saw the injustice of his foolish temper, had
played his new-found enemy with a malicious adroitness. The aboriginal
passions were strong in him. He had come of a people which had to do
with essentials in the matter of emotions. To love, to hate, to fight,
to explore, to hunt, to be loyal, to avenge, to bow to Mother Church,
to honour the king, to beget children, to taste outlawry under a more
refined name, and to die without whining: that was its range of duty,
and a very sufficient range it was.

The talk had been running on Bucklaw. It had then shifted to Radisson.
Gering had crowded home with flagrant emphasis the fact that, while
Radisson was a traitor and a scoundrel,--which Iberville himself had
admitted with an ironical frankness,--he was also a Frenchman. It was at
this point that Iberville remembered, also with something of irony,
the words that Jessica had used that afternoon when she came out of the
sunshine into the ante-room of the governor's chamber. She had waved her
hand into the distance and had said: "Foolish boy!" He knew very well
that that part of the game was turned against him, but with a kind of
cheerful recklessness, as was ever his way with odds against him, and
he guessed that the odds were with Gering in the matter of Jessica,--he
bent across the table and repeated them with an exasperating turn to his
imperfect accent. "Foolish boy!" he said, and awaited, not for long, the
event.

"A fool's lie," retorted Gering, in a low, angry voice, and spilled his
wine.

At that Iberville's heart thumped in his throat with anger, and the roof
of his mouth became dry; never in his life had he been called a liar.
The first time that insult strikes a youth of spirit he goes a little
mad.

But he was very quiet--an ominous sort of quietness,