“Oh yes! It was pleasant. Of course, it’s an opportunity, being allowed to come with Madame St. Auge to work among these poor habitants of Iberville. I’m grateful that my dear aunt learned about it and so made it possible for me to come here. But I miss the sisters in Montreal. It was my only home, the convent. It’s possible to be homesick for even a convent, if you have no other home.”

She glanced at me, as if to see whether I understood, and I felt a warm stirring in my chest, as though a vein had somehow opened and closed again.

Now where, I wondered, would Marie de Sabrevois have learned that Hazen, a landowner in this far-off place, had decided to employ nuns to teach the children of the farmers on his estate?

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Your father was an Englishman, and your mother, too, I gather. Yet your aunt is American.”

Ellen smiled. “She would not be pleased to hear you say that! She is the sister of the gentleman—the French officer—who bought me from the Indians. He died, also, last year; and when he died, my dear aunt took me from the convent and sent me here to Madame St. Auge.”

“So she’s French,” I said, “and her brother died last year. Did her father die last year, too?”

Ellen shook her head. “Only her brother, whom she loved greatly.”

Here was something else to think about! Certainly when we had met Marie de Sabrevois in the rotunda of Ranelagh, she had told us she was American. So, too, had the reticent Mr. Leonard. I distinctly remembered hearing him call her “a countrywoman of yours.” And she had spoken, too, of the death of her father. I tried to recall whether she had told us when he died. It seemed to me she had either said or implied he had died within the year. I was sure she had said he was a fur merchant, and that she was in England to settle his affairs. That lady, I was positive, would have let no grass grow under her feet when it came to settling an estate in which she had an interest. I looked hard at Ellen Phipps and wondered how much she had in common with this aunt of hers—this aunt who had been so free with misstatements. If I was any hand at reading character, she had nothing in common with her, but I had heard that one could never tell about a woman.

“Why did your aunt take you from the convent to send you here?” I asked her.

She raised her eyes and started to speak. Then the golden light in them dimmed and wavered like a candleflame blown by the wind, and she was silent.