“I thank you for your kindness, M'sieu, but I must decline it further. Come, Ivrey,” and turning he picked up his wide hat, bowed first to McElroy and then to Ridgar, and strode toward the outer door. As he passed the lintel the not insignificant form of Rette blocked his exit, en route for a cup she had left behind. With an instant flourish the hat in his hand swept the logs of the floor, he seized the woman's toil-hard fingers and bore them to his lips.
“Excellent, Madame, was that meal,” he murmured, “and never to be forgot so long as one unused to hardship faces privation. I thank you.”
Comely Rette flushed to her sleek hair and some flicker of a girlhood that had its modicum of grace, flared up in the swift curtsy with which she acknowledged the compliment.
And with a last flash of his blue coat Alfred de Courtenay was gone.
McElroy ran his fingers helplessly through his tousled light hair and faced his friend.
“Now, by all the Saints!” he said with a strange mixture of regret and relief, “what an unhappy ending!”
But at that moment he was thinking of the wondrous beauty of the man and of the picture of Maren Le Moyne's brown arms spread wide apart with the laughing child between, and again that little feeling of vexation crept into his wholesome heart.
Without in the soft night the late guest was striding, a graceful figure, hurriedly down toward the gate he had entered so short a time ago, and his slender hand played restlessly at his hip. His heart was seething with swift-roused emotions. So had its quick stirrings brought him into many a scrape in his eventful life. That word of his host, “which speaks almost of foes,” sang in his ears.
And yet it had been given only in the spirit of enlightenment.
Behind, John Ivrey gathered up the men idling about the fire and talking with the men of the post, where question and answer had begun to stir uneasiness.