M. de Rondiniacque looked upon me with a merry twinkle in his eye.
"Ma foi!" he said, "M. le Capitaine lays heavy commands upon me. Must I even do as he says?"
"It were best," I answered, with some severity, and never turning my eyes from the fire.
"I see not wherefore," said he; "I would gladly cheer you, lad, and he would take all the merriment from our jesting."
"Indeed," I replied, "I had rather never laugh again than hear more such talk as did pass for wit around us at dinner."
He flung himself with a movement of much petulance into a chair on the other side of the hearth, and—"My faith!" he cried, "'t is even as they did tell me: a sorry land and a sad! A country, mort de ma vie! where one must shift with beer for wine, mists for sunshine, and hags and hoydens for women."
"Alack!" I cried, being vastly amused; "have the women also displeased your lordship?"
"Gadso!" answered M. de Rondiniacque, "they have, and mightily. Mon Dieu! in all the days since we set foot ashore I have not seen one I would stand to observe a second time. I begin to see it is easy to be a Puritan in such a land."
And when I did not answer him, he peered curiously across the flickering twilight into my face. Anon he rose and came to me, with one hand seizing me by the arm, and raising my chin, not over gently, with the other—"Ma foi" he said, laughing, "with laces and furbelows, and those great eyes, wouldst make a better thyself than any lass of them all."
So I began to tremble for my secret, and saw no way out but in anger; knowing, indeed, so little of the ways of men, that I was ignorant of running a greater danger in that attempt to avoid the less.