“My son Jean Vincent de l’Abadie, Baron de Saint-Castin, has need of spiritual aid to sustain him in the paths of virtue,” said the priest impressively, “and he is seeking it.”

At every church service the lax sinner was now on his knees in plain sight of the devotee; but she never looked at him.  All the tribe soon knew what he had at heart, and it was told from camp-fire to camp-fire how he sat silent every night in the hall at Pentegoet, with his hair ruffled on his forehead, growing more haggard from day to day.

The Abenaqui girl did not talk with other women about what happened in the community.  Dead saints crowded her mind to the exclusion of living sinners.  All that she heard came by way of her companion, the stolid Etchemin, and when it was unprofitable talk it was silenced.  They labored together all the chill April afternoon, bringing the chapel out of its winter desolation.  The Etchemin made brooms of hemlock, and brushed down cobwebs and dust, and laboriously swept the rocky earthen floor, while the princess, standing upon a scaffold of split log benches, wiped the sacred picture and set a border of tender moss around it.  It was a gaudy red print representing a pierced heart.  The Indian girl kissed every sanguinary drop which dribbled down the coarse paper.  Fog and salt air had given it a musty odor, and stained the edges with mildew.  She found it no small labor to cover these stains, and pin the moss securely in place with thorns.

There were no windows in this chapel.  A platform of hewed slabs had supported the altar; and when the princess came down, and the benches were replaced, she lifted one of these slabs, as she had often done before, to look into the earthen-floored box which they made.  Little animals did not take refuge in the wind-beaten building.  She often wondered that it stood; though the light materials used by aboriginal tribes, when anchored to the earth as this house was, toughly resisted wind and weather.

The Etchemin sat down on the ground, and her mistress on the platform behind the chancel rail, when everything else was done, to make a fresh rope of evergreen.  The climbing and reaching and lifting had heated their faces, and the cool salt air flowed in, refreshing them.  Their hands were pricked by the spiny foliage, but they labored without complaint, in unbroken meditation.  A monotonous low singing of the Etchemin’s kept company with the breathing of the sea.  This decking of the chapel acted like music on the Abenaqui girl.  She wanted to be quiet, to enjoy it.

By the time they were ready to shut the door for the night the splash of a rising tide could be heard.  Fog obliterated the islands, and a bleak gray twilight, like the twilights of winter, began to dim the woods.

“The sagamore has made a new law,” said the Etchemin woman, as they came in sight of the fort.

Madockawando’s daughter looked at the unguarded bastions, and the chimneys of Pentegoet rising in a stack above the walls.