Jeanne suddenly snatched up her skirt and scrubbed her mouth vigorously.
"It has been a tiresome day," exclaimed Pani, "and thou must have a mouthful of supper, little one, and go to bed."
She put her arm over the child's shoulder, with a caress; and Jeanne pressed her rosy cheek on the hand.
"I do not want any supper but I will go to bed at once," she replied in a weary tone.
"It is said that at the eastward in the Colonies they keep just such a July day with flags and confusion and cannon firing and bells ringing. One such day in a lifetime is enough for me," declared Madame De Ber.
They kept the Fourth of July ever afterward, but this was really their national birthday.
Jeanne scrubbed her mouth again before she said her little prayer and in five minutes she was soundly asleep. But the man who had kissed her and who had been her childhood's friend staggered homeward after a roistering evening, never losing sight of the blow she had struck him.
"The tiger cat!" he said with what force he could summon. "She shall pay for this, if it is ten years! In three or four years I will marry her and then I will train her to know who is master. She shall get down on her knees to me if she is handsome as a princess, if she were a queen's daughter."
Laurent St. Armand went home to his father a good deal amused after all his disappointment and vexation, for he had been compelled to take an inferior canoe.
"Mon père," he said, as his father sat contentedly smoking, stretched out in a most comfortable fashion, "I have seen your little gossip of the morning, and I came near being in a quarrel with a son of the trader De Marsac, but we settled it amicably and I should have had a much better opinion of him, if he had not stopped to drink Jogue's vile brandy. He's a handsome fellow, too."