“When she’ll be back? When she’ll be back?” Madame St. Auge’s voice seemed to me unnecessarily loud, almost as if she wanted it to carry across the Richelieu and into General Sullivan’s headquarters.

At the thought I glanced over my shoulder. Within a few paces of me, just turning from the path as if to go around to the rear of the château, was Marie de Sabrevois.

I knew her at once, even in her dress of sober blue and her little sun-bonnet of gray silk, quite different from the billowing pink gown in which I had first seen her; but what was more remarkable was that she recognized me as well, notwithstanding my tow-cloth smock.

In spite of the dislike for her that had grown and grown in me since our London meeting, I was pleased at the sight of a familiar face in this dreary settlement; and my pleasure increased when she came to me with an exclamation of surprise. “To think,” she cried, “of meeting in St. John’s, of all places! Now how does it happen you’re here?”

“It just happens. I was ordered to come here, and so I came.”

“You were ordered to come here to this house?” she asked, studying me with a singular intentness.

“No,” I said. “I was ordered to come to St. John’s. Having come here, it occurred to me—I had some time to spare—I thought that Ellen—–”

Her fixed stare made me uncomfortable.

Madame St. Auge said coldly, “He has a message for Ellen. A message about her brother.”

“Indeed!” Marie de Sabrevois exclaimed. “Someone sends you to her with a message about her brother? Who?”

The eyes of both women probed at me; and I felt the more uncomfortable. I had put myself in a false position, which prevented the ordinary processes of conversation that might have taken place between Mademoiselle de Sabrevois and myself, wherein I would have inquired about her voyage, and told her of Nathaniel’s and mine. And being in that false position of my own contriving, I stood conscious of a tensity between these women and myself, and wondered how it had come about that I seemed to be a liar. Nevertheless I perceived that I had lied: not to them, but to myself when I persuaded myself that my errand to Ellen was in the hope that I might be of service to her. I wanted to see her again, and that was the whole truth about what brought me.

Yet I wondered also about another thing, and that was why the mere mention of a message about Ellen’s brother made these two rigid with some unguessable suspicion of me.