His distinct little figure, outlined against the sky, could be seen from the prisoners’ ship.  One prisoner saw him without taking any note that he was a child.  Her eyes were fierce and red-rimmed.  She was the only woman on the deck, having come up the gangway to get rid of habitantes.  These fellow-prisoners of hers were that moment putting their heads together below and talking about Mademoiselle Jeannette Descheneaux.  They were perhaps the only people in the world who took any thought of her.  Highlanders and seamen moving on deck scarcely saw her.  In every age of the world beauty has ruled men.  Jeannette Descheneaux was a big, manly Frenchwoman, with a heavy voice.  In Quebec, she was a contrast to the exquisite and diaphanous creatures who sometimes kneeled beside her in the cathedral, or looked out of sledge or sedan chair at her as she tramped the narrow streets.  They were the beauties of the governor’s court, who permitted in a new land the corrupt gallantries of Versailles.  She was the daughter of a shoemaker, and had been raised to a semi-official position by the promotion of her brother in the government.  Her brother had grown rich with the company of speculators who preyed on the province and the king’s stores.  He had one motherless child, and Jeannette took charge of it and his house until the child died.  She was perhaps a masculine nourisher of infancy; yet the upright mark between her black eyebrows, so deep that it seemed made by a hatchet, had never been there before the baby’s death; and it was by stubbornly venturing too far among the parishes to seek the child’s foster mother, who was said to be in some peril at Petit Cap, that Jeannette got herself taken prisoner.

For a month this active woman had been a dreamer of dreams.  Every day the prison ship floated down to Quebec, and her past stood before her like a picture.  Every night it floated up to Cap Rouge, where French camp fires flecked the gorge and the north shore stretching westward.  No strict guard was kept over the prisoners.  She sat on the ship’s deck, and a delicious languor, unlike any former experience, grew and grew upon her.  The coaxing graces of pretty women she never caricatured.  Her skin was of the dark red tint which denotes a testy disposition.  She had fierce one-sided wars for trivial reasons, and was by nature an aggressive partisan, even in the cause of a dog or a cat.  Being a woman of few phrases, she repeated these as often as she had occasion for speech, and divided the world simply into two classes:  two or three individuals, including herself, were human beings; the rest of mankind she denounced, in a voice which shook the walls, as spawn.  One does not like to be called spawn.