“I’m hinting at nothing. You saw, in Arundel, how much trouble can spring from next to nothing nowadays. Well, I want no more trouble of that sort. If you want to present your letter, hurry up about it, because I’m going with you.”

Nathaniel’s glance filled me with discomfort; for it seemed to me to hold contempt as well as anger. But at last, seeing that his displeasure had no effect on my stubbornness, he fumbled in his pocket and drew out a crumpled envelope addressed:

Ellen Phipps,
    Château de St. Auge,
       Iberville contre St. Jean.

Along the ridge opposite the St. John’s fort there were, in addition to Hazen’s house, a number of small farm houses, but only one that might be called a château—and if it was indeed a château, then Hazen’s big house, not far distant, was a royal palace. It was an affair of rough boards daubed with whitewash, capped with a roof of hand-split shingles. Its eaves, like those of most Canadian farmhouses, curved upward as if warped by the heat and the moisture of this flat country.

We turned our steps toward it, whereupon another of my London suspicions was confirmed; for cut in the wood above the entrance was a cross. When I thumped on the door, it was opened by a spectacled nun who looked at us with a face as blank as a shuttered window.

“Hold up the letter for her to see,” I told Nathaniel, “but don’t let her have it.”

He held it up, and I said, “Est-elle ici?”

The nun adjusted her spectacles and stared at the envelope: then, with a movement so quick that Nathaniel almost fell backward, she snatched at it. Nathaniel put it behind him, whereupon the nun sourly said, “Entrez!”

She left us in a room that had high-colored pictures of saints on the walls, and was furnished with four stiff chairs covered with horsehair. We waited in silence, not looking at each other, until, at length, another older woman, with an even more expressionless face, came silently into the room, and with her a girl no older than my sister Jane.

The woman, I thought, affected a nunnish air without being a nun; for her gray gown clung to her figure, but was fastened ostentatiously at the waist with a common leather strap, as if she advertised her sanctity. The girl with her seemed half a nun herself; for her dress was severe and simple, made from a rough gray material, better fitted for potato-sacking than for wearing. At her throat and wrists were bands of black, which gave her garb the look of a uniform, and not a gay uniform either.