I led the woman forward. "Father Nouvel, this is Mademoiselle Starling, an Englishwoman who was captured by the Indians. We have traveled fast and far to find you. Can you marry us at once?" It was badly done. I had jumbled my speech without wit or address, like a peasant dragging his milkmaid before the village cure. The woman may have felt my clumsiness. She dropped my hand, and curtsied deeply to the father, and he, staring, checked the hand that he had raised to extend to her, and bowed deeply in turn. It was a meeting, not of priest and refugee, but of a man and woman who had known the world. Father Nouvel was very old and his skin was wrinkled ivory, but at this moment he wore his cassock as if it were a doublet slashed with gold. His command was an entreaty. "Come nearer, daughter. I wish to see your face." She followed him close to the flaring light that poured from the wigwam, and he looked at her as unsparingly as if she were a portrait of paint and oil. "I have never seen you," he decided. "Yet the name Starling,--it is unusual, and it brings troubling memories to my mind." The woman deliberated a moment. She was indeed a woman with wit that did not need mine, and I felt it to be so, and I stood at one side, and thought out my own conclusions. She looked up. "At Meudon?" she suggested to the priest. He smote his palms together. "I am old," he mourned. "Else I could never have forgotten. At Meudon, of course. It was at a meeting of Jacobites. An exile named Starling--he was a commanding man, my daughter--was their leader. How did you know?" She stood there in her Indian dress of skins with a forest around her and talked of courts. "I remembered that you were in Paris three years ago," she explained, "and that our king--yes, our king, Father Nouvel, although a king in exile--talked sometimes with you. There was often one of your order at the meetings at Meudon." The father looked at her. "I could almost think that age and loneliness have undone my mind," he said slowly. "You talk of kings and courtiers. Who are you?" I waited, perhaps more eagerly than the priest himself, for her reply. None came. I thought she gave a flitting look toward me, and so I shrugged my shoulders and thrust myself again into the priest's thought. "If we were kings, courtiers, and Jacobites all in one," I said as airily as might be in view of my aching muscles, "the titles would yet clink dully as leaden coins, travel-worn as we are. Can you marry us this evening, Father Nouvel?" He looked at me keenly, not altogether pleased. "And you are"--he asked. "Armand de Montlivet, from Montreal." He relaxed somewhat. "I have heard of you. No, I cannot marry you to-night. I will find a lodge for this demoiselle, and we will talk of this to-morrow. Come now and let me bring you to the chief," and with a beckoning of the hand he led the way into the lodge behind him.