“You do not understand the feeling I have.”

“No, I do not understand it.  If you talked every day, it would do no good.  My thoughts are different.”

Saint-Castin gave her the pail, and looked her in the eyes.

“Perhaps you will some time understand,” he said.  “I lived many wild years before I did.”

She was so glad to leave him behind that her escape was like a backward blow, and he did not make enough allowance for the natural antagonism of a young girl.  Her beautiful free motion was something to watch.  She was a convert whose penances were usually worked out afoot, for Father Petit knew better than to shut her up.

Saint-Castin had never dreamed there were such women.  She was like a nymph out of a tree, without human responsiveness, yet with round arms and waist and rosy column of neck, made to be helplessly adored.  He remembered the lonesome moods of his early youth.  They must have been a premonition of his fate in falling completely under the spell of an unloving woman.

Saint-Castin took a roundabout course, and went to Madockawando’s lodge, near the fort.  All the members of the family, except the old chief, were away at the sugar-making.  The great Abenaqui’s dignity would not allow him to drag in fuel to the fire, so he squatted nursing the ashes, and raked out a coal to light tobacco for himself and Saint-Castin.  The white sagamore had never before come in full uniform to a private talk, and it was necessary to smoke half an hour before a word could be said.

There was a difference between the chatter of civilized men and the deliberations of barbarians.  With La Hontan, the Baron de Saint-Castin would have led up to his business by a long prelude on other subjects.  With Madockawando, he waited until the tobacco had mellowed both their spirits, and then said,—­

“Father, I want to marry your daughter in the French way, with priest and contract, and make her the Baroness de Saint-Castin.”

Madockawando, on his part, smoked the matter fairly out.  He put an arm on the sagamore’s shoulder, and lamented the extreme devotion of his daughter.  It was a good religion which the black-robed father had brought among the Abenaquis, but who had ever heard of a woman’s refusing to look at men before that religion came?  His own child, when she was at home with the tribe, lived as separate from the family and as independently as a war-chief.  In his time, the women dressed game and carried the children and drew sledges.  What would happen if his daughter began to teach them, in a house by themselves, to do nothing but pray?  Madockawando repeated that his son, the sagamore, and his father, the priest, had a good religion, but they might see for themselves what the Abenaqui tribe would come to when the women all set up for medicine squaws.  Then there was his daughter’s hiding in winter to make what she called her retreats, and her proposing to take a new name from some of the priest’s okies or saint-spirits, and to be called “Sister.”