wore, enlarged, one of the court gowns which her sovereign, the queen
of England, had often praised. Le Rossignol followed these two ladies
across the hall, alternately aping the girlish motion of Antonia and her
elder's massive progress. She considered the Dutch gentlewoman a sweet
interloper who might, on occasions, be pardoned; but Lady Dorinda was
the natural antagonist of the dwarf in Fort St. John. Marie herself
seated her mother-in-law, with the graceful deference of youth to middle
age and of present power to decayed grandeur. Lady Dorinda was not easy
to make comfortable. The New World was hardly her sphere. In earlier
life, she had learned in the school of the royal Stuarts that some
people are, by divine right, immeasurably better than others,--and
experience had thrust her down among those unfortunate others.

Seeing there were strange men in the hall, Antonia divined that the
prisoners from the keep had been brought up to supper. But Lady Dorinda
settled her chin upon her necklace, and sighed a large sigh that
priests and rough men-at-arms should weary eyes once used to revel in
court pageantry. She looked up at the portrait of her dead husband,
which hung on the wall. He had been created the first knight of Acadia;
and though this honor came from her king, and his son refused to inherit
it after him, Lady Dorinda believed that only the misfortunes of the La
Tours had prevented her being a colonial queen.

"Our chaplain being absent in the service of Sieur de la Tour," spoke
Marie, "will monsieur, in his own fashion, bless this meal?"

Father Jogues spread the remnant of his hands, but Antonia did not hear
a word he breathed. She was again in Fort Orange. The Iroquois stalked
up hilly paths and swarmed around the plank huts of Dutch traders. With
the savages walked this very priest, their patient drudge until some of