The governor patted her hand, and then rejoined: "Now, now, I forgot the
lady; but I cannot always remember that you are full fifteen years old."

Standing up, with all due gravity and courtesy, "Monsieur Iberville," he
said, "let me present you to Mistress Jessica Leveret, the daughter of my
good and honoured and absent friend, the Honourable Hogarth Leveret."

So the governor and his councillor stood shoulder to shoulder at one
window, debating Count Frontenac's message; and shoulder to shoulder at
another stood Iberville and Jessica Leveret. And what was between these
at that moment--though none could have guessed it--signified as much to
the colonies of France and England, at strife in the New World, as the
deliberations of their elders.




CHAPTER II

THE THREAT OF A RENEGADE

Iberville was used to the society of women. Even as a young lad, his
father's notable place in the colony, and the freedom and gaiety of life
in Quebec and Montreal, had drawn upon him a notice which was as much a
promise of the future as an accent of the present. And yet, through all
of it, he was ever better inspired by the grasp of a common soldier, who
had served with Carignan-Salieres, or by the greeting and gossip of such
woodsmen as Du Lhut, Mantet, La Durantaye, and, most of all, his staunch
friend Perrot, chief of the coureurs du bois. Truth is, in his veins was
the strain of war and adventure first and before all. Under his tutor,