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The Refugees by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
page 37 of 474 (07%)
and his brisk bearing, he looked like a man who was on good terms with
Fortune. Indeed, he had good cause to be so, for she had used him well.
Three years ago he had been an unknown subaltern bush-fighting with
Algonquins and Iroquois in the wilds of Canada. An exchange had brought
him back to France and into the regiment of Picardy, but the lucky
chance of having seized the bridle of the king's horse one winter's day
in Fontainebleau when the creature was plunging within a few yards of a
deep gravel-pit had done for him what ten campaigns might have failed to
accomplish. Now as a trusted officer of the king's guard, young,
gallant, and popular, his lot was indeed an enviable one. And yet, with
the strange perversity of human nature, he was already surfeited with
the dull if magnificent routine of the king's household, and looked back
with regret to the rougher and freer days of his early service.
Even there at the royal door his mind had turned away from the frescoed
passage and the groups of courtiers to the wild ravines and foaming
rivers of the West, when suddenly his eyes lit upon a face which he had
last seen among those very scenes.

"Ah, Monsieur de Frontenac!" he cried. "You cannot have forgotten me."

"What! De Catinat! Ah, it is a joy indeed to see a face from over the
water! But there is a long step between a subaltern in the Carignan and
a captain in the guards. You have risen rapidly."

"Yes; and yet I may be none the happier for it. There are times when I
would give it all to be dancing down the Lachine Rapids in a birch
canoe, or to see the red and the yellow on those hill-sides once more at
the fall of the leaf."

"Ay," sighed De Frontenac. "You know that my fortunes have sunk as
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