“First, hold up your head as if about to salute your military superior.”
“M’sieur, it would never do to call a woman your military superior.”
“Then say to her, ‘Mademoiselle, you are the most beautiful woman in the world.’”
Again Jacques shook his head.
“Pardon, m’sieur. You have had experience, but you never had to marry one of them and take the consequences of your fair talk. I wish to be cautious. Perhaps if I allow her the first shot in this business she may yield me the last word hereafter.”
So, following Madame Bourdon’s beckoning hand, he made his shamefaced way towards Louise Bibelot. Mother Mary stood beside the log-fire some distance away, in the act of administering dignified rebuke to a girl in a long mantle, who, with her back turned to the hall, heard the abbess in silence. When the abbess moved away in stately dudgeon, the girl kept her place as if in reverie, her fair, unusual hand stretched towards the fire.
“Here, Louise Bibelot,” said the good shepherdess of the king’s flock, “comes Jacques Goffinet to seek a wife—Jacques Goffinet, recommended by Monsieur Daulac, the Sieur des Ormeaux, commandant of the fort at Montreal, and seignior of the islands about St. Bernard.”
Louise made her reverence to Madame Bourdon and the suitor, and Jacques held his cap in tense fists. He thought regretfully of Turkish battle-fields which he had escaped. Louise swept him in one black-eyed look terminating on her folded hands, and he repented ever coming to New France at all.
The pair were left to court. Around them arose murmur and tinkle of voices, the tread of passing feet, and the bolder noise of the lower hall, to which Madame Bourdon hastened back that she might repress a too-frolic Cupid.