I did not know what made Madame de Ferrier watch me from her distant place with widened eyes.

Miss Chantry spoke shrilly to her brother behind me.

“You will never be able to do anything with a lad who thrusts himself forward like that!  He has no sense of fitness!—­standing there and facing down the brother of a crowned head!—­bad as the head is.  Of course Mademoiselle Annabel set him on; she loves to make people ridiculous!”

I walked downstairs after Prince Jerome, threaded a way among gazing dancers, and left the hall, stung in my pride.

We do strangely expand and contract in vital force and reach of vision.  I wanted to put the lake—­the world itself—­between me and that glittering company.  The edge of a ball-room and the society of men in silks and satins, and of bewitching women, were not intended for me.

Homesickness like physical pain came over me for my old haunts.  They were newly recognized as beloved.  I had raged against them when comparing myself to Croghan.  But now I thought of the evening camp fire, and hunting-stories, of the very dogs that licked my hand; of St. Regis, and my loft bed, of snowshoes, and the blue northern river, longing for them as the young Mohawks said I should long.  Tom betwixt two natures, the white man’s and the Indian’s, I flung a boat out into the water and started to go home faster than I had come away.  The slowness of a boat’s progress, pushed by the silly motion of oars, which have not the nice discrimination of a paddle, impressed me as I put the miles behind.

When the camp light shone through trees it must have been close to midnight, and my people had finished their celebration of the corn dance.  An odor of sweet roasted ears dragged out of hot ashes reached the poor outsider.  Even the dogs were too busy to nose me out.  I slunk as close as I dared and drew myself up a tree, lying stretched with arms and legs around a limb.

They would have admitted me to the feast, but as a guest.  I had no longer a place of my own, either here or there.  It was like coming back after death, to realize that you were unmissed.  The camp was full of happiness and laughter.  Young men chased the young maids, who ran squealing with merriment.  My father, Thomas Williams, and my mother, Marianne, sat among the elders tranquil and satisfied.  They were ignorant Indians; but I had no other parents.  Skenedonk could be seen, laughing at the young Mohawks.

If there was an oval faced mother in my past, who had read to me from the missal, I wanted her.  If, as Madame Tank said, I outranked De Chaumont’s daughter, I wanted my rank.  It was necessary for me to have something of my own:  to have love from somebody!

Collapsed and dejected, I crept down the tree and back to the life that was now forced upon me whether I wished to continue it or not.  Belonging nowhere, I remembered my refuge in the new world of books.