“For the same as your Prince Rupert, Prince Robber, took his.  Go out light as a cork, come back loaded with Spanish gold to the water-line.”  Ben paused to take a pinch of snuff and display his new embroidered waist-coat.

“Look you at the wealth in the beaver trade,” he added.  “M.  Radisson went home with George Carteret not worth a curse, formed the Fur Company, and came back from Hudson Bay with pelts packed to the quarter-deck.  Devil sink me! but they say, after the fur sale, the gentlemen adventurers had to haul the gold through London streets with carts!  Bread o’ grace, Ramsay, have half an eye for your own purse!” he urged.  “There is a life for a man o’ spirit!  Why don’t you join the beaver trade, Ramsay?”

Why not, indeed?  ’Twas that or turn cut-purse and road-lifter for a youth of birth without means in those days.

Of Jack Battle I saw less.  He shipped with the fishing boats in the summer and cruised with any vagrant craft for the winter.  When he came ashore he was as small and eel-like and shy and awkward as ever, with the same dumb fidelity in his eyes.

And what a snowy maid had Rebecca become!  Sitting behind her spinning-wheel, with her dainty fingers darting in the sunlight, she seemed the pink and whitest thing that ever grew, with a look on her face of apple-blossoms in June; but the sly wench had grown mighty demure with me.  When I laughed over that ending to our last lesson, she must affect an air of injury.  ’Twas neither her fault nor mine, I declare, coaxing back her good-humour; ’twas the fault of the face.  I wanted to see where the white began and the pink ended.  Then Rebecca, with cheeks a-bloom under the hiding of her bonnet, quickens steps to the meeting-house; but as a matter of course we walk home together, for behind march the older folk, staidly discoursing of doctrine.

“Rebecca,” I say, “you did not take your eyes off the preacher for one minute.”

“How do you know, Ramsay?” retorts Rebecca, turning her face away with a dimple trembling in her chin, albeit it was the Sabbath.

“That preacher is too handsome to be sound in his doctrine, Rebecca.”

Then she grows so mighty prim she must ask which heading of the sermon pleases me best.

“I liked the last,” I declare; and with that, we are at the turnstile.

Hortense became a vision of something lost, a type of what I had known when great ladies came to our country hall.  M. Picot himself took her on the grand tour of the Continent.  How much we had been hoping to see more of her I did not realize till she came back and we saw less.

Once I encountered M. Picot and his ward on the wharf.  Her curls were more wayward than of old and her large eyes more lustrous, full of deep, new lights, dark like the flash of a black diamond.  Her form appeared slender against the long, flowing mantilla shot with gold like any grand dame’s.  She wore a white beaver with plumes sweeping down on her curls.  Indeed, little Hortense seemed altogether such a great lady that I held back, though she was looking straight towards me.