“For love of her?”
“Again, I think not.”
“Then, why? I wish I might play the spy on him. It is a pretty tale of romance of which I would fain see the end. And this Pierre who has gone in search of the child’s father?”
Jeanne did not show her surprise. She had not heard of Pierre and did not know that Alaine’s sudden confidence had been given because the presence of a girl of her own age had invited it. “Of Pierre I cannot say,” returned Jeanne, after a silence. “It has been some time, you see,” she added, diplomatically.
“And all these months the girl has worn this strange garb. I wonder she could so endure it. Twice, she tells me, she has been obliged to don such a costume for purposes of escape.”
“Evil lines have been hers, but the Lord has delivered her,” replied Jeanne, piously.
Madam smiled at the incongruity of the speech with the appearance of the speaker. “You do not disguise yourself, good sir,” she remarked. “There would be little use in your appearing in the dress of a woman once you spoke. Yet your face is smooth of beard, and I have seen women as tall.”
“I have been for many years a companion of the coureurs de bois,” returned Jeanne, calmly. “I am not unversed in matters of the hunt, in trapping beasts, and in those manly accomplishments which are known to the voyageurs.”
“A voyageur? Then sing me one of their songs,” said Madam, laughing. And the good Jeanne, with a twinkle in her eye, trolled out a boatman’s ditty, at the sound of which Alaine and Trynje started from their place by the window and came toward them.
“Good!” cried Madam, clapping her hands when Jeanne had finished. “It was a well-answered test, monsieur. I trust that you will pardon me for putting you to it. Strange and doubtful as your story may have seemed, I believe it, and that you are in very truth what you seem.”