She looked genuinely blank. “Lanaudiere? No; I have never heard of anybody of that name; and as for letters, my aunt said I would be expected by her friends in Albany, and there was no need for me to have a letter to them. The only two letters I carried had nothing at all to do with any Lanaudiere, and were not even written by my aunt, because she sent them with me to oblige a friend of hers who wrote them. No, they were not to anyone with a French name.”

“Now wait,” I said to myself. “Now wait! Here it is! Here’s something at last!” If I could see those letters, I might have something to open Nathaniel’s eyes to what I feared was the truth. As carelessly as I could I asked Ellen whether she still had them.

She shook her head placidly. “They have gone. Major Scott, he said both of the gentlemen were in Albany.” She laughed. “And so, though I wouldn’t go with him myself, I thought he could carry the letters for me, and he took them.”

Nathaniel had been looking at me sulkily and shrewdly. “You won’t make anything out of this, Peter,” he said. “Those letters were written by a friend of Marie’s—a Mr. Baudoin, whom I know; and he had known those two gentlemen in Canada, and had favors from them, and merely wished to send them a message of greeting and thanks after they had left.”

To myself I said that this was a likely story, all my eye and my elbow. To Nathaniel I said nothing of the sort, though it sickened me to realize he was so infatuated with Marie de Sabrevois that he failed, even now, to see the weak point in what she had told him—to realize that her very insistence on the innocence of the letters ought to be sure proof of their guilt.

“Very well,” I said. “It’s not my business, and I didn’t mean to seem prying if a Canadian gentleman asks Mademoiselle de Sabrevois to forward two letters to American gentlemen, friends of his, who’ve been traveling in Canada during the war. I’m sure that’s very natural! Why shouldn’t she?”

I spoke as easily and quietly as I could, and in as matter-of-fact a tone, as though I were dismissing the matter; but Nathaniel’s color deepened.

“What do you mean?” he asked me challengingly. “What do you mean by talking about Marie’s forwarding letters to American gentlemen who’ve been traveling in Canada during the war? I don’t like your tone, Peter, and you’d better understand respectfully that the two gentlemen at whom you seem to sneer are among the most important, finest and best-considered officers in our army. I’d have you know, if you please, that one of ’em was Colonel Easton and the other Major Brown—Major John Brown.”