She drew closer, in the gentle caressing way she had, and found my disengaged hand, her sweet face held upward so that I could mark every changing expression.

“Never in my useless life was I farther removed from any spirit of mockery,” she insisted, soberly; “for never before have I seen the presence of God so clearly manifest in His mysterious guidance of men.  You, who sought after poor Elsa Matherson in this wilderness, looking perchance for a helpless orphan child, have been led to pluck me in safety out from savage hands, and yet never once dreamed that in doing so you only fulfilled your earlier mission.”

I stared at her, grasping with difficulty the full significance of her speech.

“Your words puzzle me.”

“Nay, they need not,” and I caught the sudden glitter of tears on her lashes; “for I am Elsa Matherson.”

“You? you?” and I crushed her soft hand within my fingers, as I peered forward at the quickly lowered face.  “Why, you are French, Mademoiselle, and of a different name!”

She glanced up now into my puzzled face, a bit shyly, yet with some of the old roguishness visible in her eyes.

“My mother was indeed French, but my father was an American soldier,” she said rapidly, as if eager to have the explanation ended.  “You never asked my name, save that one night when we first met amid the sand, and then I gave you only that by which I have been most widely known.  None except my father ever called me Elsa; to all others I was always Toinette.  But I am Roger Matherson’s only child.”

It was clear enough now, and the deception had been entirely my own, rendered possible by strange chances of omission, by rare negligence of speech—­aided by my earlier impression that she whom I sought was a mere child.

“And ’t was Sister Celeste who told you whom I sought?” I asked, for lack of courage to say more.

“Yes, to-night, while we waited for you beside the ruins of the old factory.  Oh, how far away it all seems now!” and she pointed backward across the voters.  “Poor, poor girl!  Poor Captain de Croix!  Oh, it is all so sad, so unutterably sad to me!  I knew them both so well, Monsieur,” and she rested her bowed head upon one hand, staring out into the night, and speaking almost as if to herself alone; “yet I never dreamed that he was a nobleman of France, or that he had married Marie Faneuf.  She was so sweet a girl then,—­and now to be buried alive in that wilderness!  Think you that he truly loved her?”

“I almost have faith that he did, Mademoiselle,” I answered gravely.  “He was greatly changed from his first sight of her face, though he was a difficult man to gauge in such matters.  There was a time when I believed him in love with you.”

She tossed her head.

“Nay,” she answered, “he merely thought he was, because he found me hard to understand and difficult of conquest; but ’t was little more than his own vanity that drew him hither.  I trust it may be the deeper feeling that has taken him back now in face of death to Marie.”