had not met you. It was fortunate for me that the English captain
brought you out of your course. For mynheer set out to follow me there.
And now he has come across the wilderness even to this fort!"

"Confess," said Marie, giving her a little shake, "how pleased you are
with such a determined lover!"

But instead of doing this, Antonia burst again into frenzied sobbing and
hugged her comforter.

"O madame, you are the only person I dare love in the world!"

Marie smoothed the young widow's damp hair with the quieting stroke
which calms children.

"Let mother help thee," she said; and neither of them remembered that
she was scarcely as old as Antonia. In love and motherhood, in military
peril, and contact with riper civilizations, to say nothing of inherited
experience, the lady of St. John had lived far beyond Antonia Bronck.

"Your husband made you take an oath not to wed again,--is it so?"

"No, madame, he never did."

"Yet you told me he left you his money?"

"Yes. He was very good to me. For I had neither father nor mother."

"And he bound you by no promise?