Presently the big door was thrown open, and all faces flashed about to the new interest. Outside stood a double red line of English soldiers. An officer—the round-faced Colonel Winslow himself—stepped in, a scroll of paper curling in his hand. In a precise and something pompous voice he read aloud the names of those to go. The Le Marchands were first on the roll; then the Le Boutilliers, Ba’tiste Chouan, Jean and Tamin Masson, and a long list that promised to thin our crowded benches by one-third. But I was left among the unsummoned; and my cousin Marc, and long Philibert Trou, and the wily fox La Mouche; and I saw Marc’s lips compress with a significant satisfaction when he saw these two remaining. Vaguely I thought—“He has a plan!” But thereafter, in my gloom, I thought no more of it. So these chosen ones marched off between their guards; and that afternoon the ship went out on the ebb tide with a wind that carried her, white-sailed, around the dark point of Blomidon. Grand Pré chapel prison settled apathetically back to a deeper calm. Chapter XXVIII The Ships of her Exile The days dragged till December was setting his hoar face toward death, and still delayed the last ships. The jailers grew sour-visaged. From Yvonne came no more word, only the tidings that she was not well, and that her people were troubled for her. Father Fafard’s cheery wrinkles at mouth and eyes deepened from cheer to care; but still his lips locked over the name of Yvonne. My hope sank ever lower and lower. That old wound in my head, cured by Grûl’s searching simples, began to harass me afresh—whether from cold, the chapel being but barn-like, or from the circumstance that my heart, ceaselessly gnawing upon itself, gnawed also upon every tissue and nerve. I came strangely close to the ranger La Mouche in those bad days; for though I knew not, nor cared nor dared to ask, his story, I saw in his eyes a something which he, too, doubtless saw in mine. So it came that we sat much together, in a black silence. It was not that I loved less than of old my true comrade Marc, but the fact that he possessed where he loved, and could with blissful confidence look forward, set him some way apart from me. Upon La Mouche, with the deep hurt sullen in his eyes, I could look and mutter to myself: “Old, wily fox, is your foot, once so free, caught in the snare of a woman?” So tortuous a thing in its workings is this red clot of a human heart that I got a kind of perverted solace out of such thoughts as these. At last the tired watchers at our south windows announced two ship in the basin. They came up on the flood, and dropped anchor off the Gaspereau mouth. “This ends it,” I heard Marc say coolly. “All that’s left of Grand Pré can go in those two ships.” To me the words came as a knell for the burial of my last hope.