"Good-night, Zélie," answered a voice within.
"If you have further need of me, you will call me, madame?"
"Assuredly. Get to your rest. To-morrow we may have stormy weather for our voyage home."
The woman closed the door, and the face of the one who had hearkened to her turned again to the fireplace. It was a room repeating the men's barrack in hewed floor, loophole windows, and rough joists.
This frontier outpost on the ridge since called Beausejour was merely a convenient halting-place for one of the lords of Acadia. It stood on a detached spot of his large seigniory, which he had received with other portions of western Acadia in exchange for his grant of Cape Sable.
Though in his early thirties, Charles de la Tour had seen long service in the New World. Seldom has a man from central France met the northern cold and sea air with so white a favor. His clean-shaven skin and the sunny undecided color of his hair were like a child's. Part of his armor had been unbuckled, and lay on the floor near him. He sat in a chair of twisted boughs, made of refuse from trees his men had dragged out of the neighboring forest for the building of the outpost. His wife sat on a pile of furs beside his knee. Her Huguenot cap lay on the shelf above the fire. She wore a black gown slashed in the sleeves with white, and a kerchief of lace pushed from her throat. Her black hair, which Zélie had braided, hung down in two ropes to the floor.
"How soon, monsieur," she asked, "can you return to Fort St. John?"
"With all speed possible, Marie. Soon, if we can work the miracle of moving a peace-loving man like Denys to action."
"Nicholas Denys ought to take part with you."
"Yet he will scarce do it."