My rage at the potter ending in good nature, I moved to make some amends for my haste; but he backed off.

“You startled us,” said the other man, “standing up in the clouds like ghosts.  And your resemblance to one who has been dead many years is very striking, monsieur.”

I said I was sorry if I had kicked the potter without warrant, but it seemed to me a base act to hesitate when help was asked for a woman.

“Yet I know little of what is right among men, monsieur,” I owned.  “I have been learning with a master in Count de Chaumont’s manor house less than a year.  Before that my life was spent in the woods with the Indians, and they found me so dull that I was considered witless until my mind awoke.”

“You are a fine fellow,” the man said, laying his hands on my shoulders.  “My heart goes out to you.  You may call me Louis Philippe.  And what may I call you?”

“Lazarre.”

He had a smiling good face, square, but well curved and firm.  Now that I saw him fronting me I could trace his clear eyebrows, high forehead, and the laughter lines down his cheeks.  He was long between the eyes and mouth, and he had a full and resolute chin.

“You are not fat, Lazarre,” said Philippe, “your forehead is wide rather than receding, and you have not a double chin.  Otherwise you are the image of one—­Who are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know who you are?”

“No.  We heard all that you and the potter were saying down here, and I wondered how many boys there are in America that are provided for through an agent in New York, without knowing their parents.  Now that is my case.”

“Do you say you have lived among the Indians?”

“Yes:  among the Iroquois.”

“Who placed you there?”

“No one could tell me except my Indian father; and he would not tell.”

“Do you remember nothing of your childhood?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you ever see Bellenger before?”

“I never saw him before to-night.”

“But I saw him,” said Madame de Ferrier, “in London, when I was about seven years old.  It made a stronger impression on me than anything else that ever happened in my life, except”—­she stopped.

“Except the taking off of my mother and brothers to the guillotine.”

The man who told me to call him Louis Philippe turned toward her, with attention as careful as his avoidance when she wished to be unobserved.  She rose, and came around the fire, making a deep courtesy.

“My family may not be unknown to his royal highness the Duke of Orleans.  We are De Ferriers of Mont-Louis; emigres now, like many others.”

“Madame, I knew your family well.  They were loyal to their king.”

“My father died here in America.  Before we sailed we saw this man in London.”

“And with him—­”

“A boy.”

“Do you remember the boy well?”