Amos nodded with intense appreciation.  “That’s it!” said he, “that’s Injun ways.  I’ll lay that he is right.”

“Then they may be in the woods round us.  We may be in danger,” cried De la Noue.

Du Lhut nodded and sucked at his pipe.

De Catinat cast a glance round him at the grand tree trunks, the fading foliage, the smooth sward underneath with the long evening shadows barred across it.  How difficult it was to realise that behind all this beauty there lurked a danger so deadly and horrible that a man alone might well shrink from it, far less one who had the woman whom he loved walking within hand’s touch of him.  It was with a long heart-felt sigh of relief that he saw a wall of stockade in the midst of a large clearing in front of him, with the stone manor house rising above it.  In a line from the stockade were a dozen cottages with cedar-shingled roofs turned up in the Norman fashion, in which dwelt the habitants under the protection of the seigneur’s chateau—­a strange little graft of the feudal system in the heart of an American forest.  Above the main gate as they approached was a huge shield of wood with a coat of arms painted upon it, a silver ground with a chevron ermine between three coronets gules.  At either corner a small brass cannon peeped through an embrasure.  As they passed the gate the guard inside closed it and placed the huge wooden bars into position.  A little crowd of men, women, and children were gathered round the door of the chateau, and a man appeared to be seated on a high-backed chair upon the threshold.

“You know my father,” said the young man with a shrug of his shoulders.  “He will have it that he has never left his Norman castle, and that he is still the Seigneur de la Noue, the greatest man within a day’s ride of Rouen, and of the richest blood of Normandy.  He is now taking his dues and his yearly oaths from his tenants, and he would not think it becoming, if the governor himself were to visit him, to pause in the middle of so august a ceremony.  But if it would interest you, you may step this way and wait until he has finished.  You, madame, I will take at once to my mother, if you will be so kind as to follow me.”

The sight was, to the Americans at least, a novel one.  A triple row of men, women, and children were standing round in a semicircle, the men rough and sunburned, the women homely and clean, with white caps upon their heads, the children open-mouthed and round-eyed, awed into an unusual quiet by the reverent bearing of their elders.  In the centre, on his high-backed carved chair, there sat an elderly man very stiff and erect, with an exceedingly solemn face.  He was a fine figure of a man, tall and broad, with large strong features, clean-shaven and deeply-lined, a huge beak of a nose, and strong shaggy eyebrows which arched right up to the great wig, which he wore full and long as it had been worn in France in his youth.