“Not I. Poor Dollard brought little here but his sword. One of my superior officers abandoned it in my favor, and took a less exposed seigniory near the Richelieu. I wish the inside appointments better befitted you. It was a grand château to me until I now compare it with its châtelaine.”
“Never mind, monsieur. When you demand my fortune from France, you can make your château as grand as you desire. I hope you will get some good of my fortune, for I never have done so. Seriously, monsieur, if no house were here, and there were only that great rock to shelter us, I should feel myself a queen if you brought me to it, so great is my lot.”
“You can say this to poor Adam Dollard, an obscure soldier of the province?”
“In these few days,” replied the girl, laughing, and she threw the light of her topaz eyes half towards him, “the way they call your name in this new country has become to me like a title.”
“You shall have more than a title,” burst out Dollard. “Heaven helping me, you shall yet have a name that will not die!”
They passed through the gate of the palisade, Jacques and Louise following with the loads of the expedition. To insure its safety the boat was afterwards dragged within the palisade.
The censitaire in charge, with his wife at his shoulder, stood grinning at Jacques’s approach.
“Thou got’st thyself a wife, hé, my pretty Jacques?”
“That did I, bonhomme Papillon. And a good wife, and a stout wife, and a handsome. Thou ’lt want to go to Quebec market thyself when the Indians carry off Joan.”