But De Courtenay had drawn himself to his slender height, his hand at his hip, where, in other times, had dangled a sword.

“Nay, M’sieu,” he said quickly, “a blunder found and unremedied becomes two.  If I ay gather my men we will sleep outside an unfriendly fort,—­ and in the name of De Courtenay allow me to repay the cost of their entertainment.”

Reckless, indeed, was this young cavalier, else he would not have made that speech.

Anders McElroy turned white beneath his tan and his fingers tapped the table.

“Not ungrateful am I, M’sieu, but I stick by the colours I choose.  If our companies are rivals, then we are such, and I follow my master’s lead.  It is at present the North-west organisation.  I am pledged in Montreal—­and—­I prove faithful.”

The young man’s face was fired with that spirit which ever lay so near the surface and he looked at his whilom host with a mighty hauteur.

“I thank you for your kindness, M’sieu, but I must decline it further.  Come, Ivrey,” and turning he picked up his wide hat, bowed first to McElroy and then to Ridgar, and strode toward the outer door.  As he passed the lintel the not insignificant form of Rette blocked his exit, en route for a cup she had left behind.  With an instant flourish the hat in his hand swept the logs of the floor, he seized the woman’s toil-hard fingers and bore them to his lips.

“Excellent, Madame, was that meal,” he murmured, “and never to be forgot so long as one unused to hardship faces privation.  I thank you.”

Comely Rette flushed to her sleek hair and some flicker of a girlhood that had its modicum of grace, flared up in the swift curtsy with which she acknowledged the compliment.

And with a last flash of his blue coat Alfred de Courtenay was gone.

McElroy ran his fingers helplessly through his tousled light hair and faced his friend.

“Now, by all the Saints!” he said with a strange mixture of regret and relief, “what an unhapy ending!”

But at that moment he was thinking of the wondrous beauty of the man and of the picture of Maren Le Moyne’s brown arms spread wide apart with the laughing child between, and again that little feeling of vexation crept into his wholesome heart.

Without in the soft night the late guest was striding, a graceful figure, hurriedly down toward the gate he had entered so short a time ago, and his slender hand played restlessly at his hip.  His heart was seething with swift-roused emotions.  So had its quick stirrings brought him into many a scrape in his eventful life.  That word of his host, “which speaks almost of foes,” sang in his ears.

And yet it had been given only in the spirit of enlightenment.

Behind, John Ivrey gathered up the men idling about the fire and talking with the men of the post, where question and answer had begun to stir uneasiness.

In a ragged, uneven line they strung out, fading into the darkness, and presently from down the river some forty rods there rose up the columns of their fires.