Though Jeannette had never given herself to exaggerated worship, she was religious.  The lack of priest and mass on the prison transport was blamed for the change which came over her.  A haze of real feminine softness, like the autumn’s purpling of rocks, made her bones less prominent.  But the habitantes, common women from the parishes, who had children and a few of their men with them, saw what ailed her.  They noticed that while her enmity to the English remained unchanged, she would not hear a word against the Highlanders, though Colonel Fraser and his Seventy-Eighth Highland regiment had taken her prisoner.  It is true, Jeannette was treated with deference, and her food was sent to her from the officer’s table, and she had privacy on the ship which the commoner prisoners had not.  It is also true that Colonel Fraser was a gentleman, detesting the parish-burning to which his command was ordered for a time.  But the habitantes laid much to his blue eyes and yellow hair, and the picturesqueness of the red and pale green Fraser tartan.  They nudged one another when Jeannette began to plait her strong black locks, and make a coronet of them on her sloping head.  She was always exact and neat in her dress, and its mannishness stood her in good stead during her month’s imprisonment.  Rough wool was her invariable wear, instead of taffetas and silky furs, which Quebec women delighted in.  She groomed herself carefully each day for that approach to the English camp at Point Levi which the tide accomplished.  Her features could be distinguished half a mile.  On the days when Colonel Fraser’s fezlike plumed bonnet was lifted to her in the camp, she went up the river again in a trance of quiet.  On other days the habitantes laughed, and said to one another, “Mademoiselle will certainly break through the deck with her tramping.”

There was a general restlessness on the prison ship.  The English sailors wanted to go home.  The Canadians had been patient since the middle of August.  But this particular September night, as they drifted up past the rock, and saw the defenses of their country bristling against them, the feeling of homesickness vented itself in complaints.  Jeannette was in her cabin, and heard them abuse Colonel Fraser and his Highlanders as kidnapers of women and children, and burners of churches.  She came out of her retreat, and hovered over them like a hawk.  The men pulled their caps off, drolly grinning.

“It is true,” added one of them, “that General Montcalm is to blame for letting the parishes burn.  And at least he might take us away from the English.”

“Do you think Monsieur de Montcalm has nothing to do but bring you in off the river?” demanded Jeannette.

“Mademoiselle does not want to be brought in,” retorted one of the women.  “As for us, we are not in love with these officers who wear petticoats, or with any of our enemies.”

“Spawn!” Jeanette hurled at them.  Yet her partisan fury died in her throat.  She went up on deck to be away from her accusers.  The seamed precipice, the indented cove with the child’s figure standing at the top, and all the panorama to which she was so accustomed by morning light or twilight passed before her without being seen by her fierce red-rimmed eyes.