I fancied her unstrung by excitement, by the strain of her trying labor, by the loneliness of her life, uncertain, misunderstood, perhaps, as it was. I wondered if she could be more unhappy than I myself, if life could offer her less than it did to me. But I dared not prolong our masking, lest all should be unmasked. "It is nothing!" she said at last, and laughed gaily as ever. "Yes, Madam, it is nothing. I admit my defeat. I shall ask no more favors, expect no further information from you, for I have not earned it, and I can not pay. I will make no promise that I could not keep." "Then we part even!" "As enemies or friends?" "I do not yet know. I can not think--for a long time. But I, too, am defeated." "I do not understand how Madam can be defeated in anything." "Ah, I am defeated only because I have won. I have your secret; you do not have mine. But I laid also another wager, with myself. I have lost it. Ceremony or not--and what does the ceremony value?--you _are_ married. I had not known marriage to be possible. I had not known you--you savages. No--so much--I had not known." "Monsieur, adieu!" she added swiftly. I bent and kissed her hand. "Madam, _au revoir!_" "No, _adieu!_ Go!" CHAPTER XVII A HUNTER OF BUTTERFLIES I love men, not because they are men, but because they are not women.--_Queen Christina_. There was at that time in Montreal a sort of news room and public exchange, which made a place of general meeting. It was supplied with newspapers and the like, and kept up by subscriptions of the town merchants--a spacious room made out of the old Methodist chapel on St. Joseph Street. I knew this for a place of town gossip, and hoped I might hit upon something to aid me in my errand, which was no more than begun, it seemed. Entering the place shortly before noon, I made pretense of reading, all the while with an eye and an ear out for anything that might happen. As I stared in pretense at the page before me, I fumbled idly in a pocket, with unthinking hand, and brought out to place before me on the table, an object of which at first I was unconscious--the little Indian blanket clasp. As it lay before me I felt seized of a sudden hatred for it, and let fall on it a heavy hand. As I did so, I heard a voice at my ear. "_Mein Gott_, man, do not! You break it, surely." I started at this. I had not heard any one approach. I discovered now that the speaker had taken a seat near me at the table, and could not fail to see this object which lay before me. "I beg pardon," he said, in a broken speech which showed his foreign birth; "but it iss so beautiful; to break it iss wrong."