"The same, M. le Comte."
"Did he command at Fort William Henry, where the defeated troops were so shamefully abandoned by General Webb, and were afterwards massacred by the Iroquois?"
"He did. I was saved from that massacre by the wife of a French soldier. It was my second narrow escape from the Iroquois, then; for once before two Indians bore me into the forest, and my life was spared by the luckiest chance in the world."
"You must have been very young," said Beauchatel; "I too, served there, and am quite an old fellow now."
"I was a mere child, messieurs, in those days."
"Ah, they will soon be friends now!" thought Therese; "already they are comrades."
"And you were saved—" resumed D'Arcot.
"By an officer named MacGillivray, who was on his march to join that ill-fated garrison with a party of the Black Watch, the same regiment to which I have now the honour to belong. Then followed that unparalleled massacre, the memory of which seems like a horrible dream to me."
"And to me, too, boy; for I, also, was at the siege of Fort William Henry, and I was that lieutenant of the Black Watch who saved you from the Iroquois," said Count d'Arcot, taking the hand of Munro in his; "I had, then, a wife—perhaps a child," he added in a troubled voice; "but both lie buried in the forest by the shore of Lake George!"
"Your wife, M. le Comte," said Beauchatel; "how did she die?"