"You will perceive, my old friend and, I hope, old enemy, that I present to you a whole bouquet of charms: beauty of form, the radiance of a personality, and brains with an edge to flatter or flout. Very rarely does Providence dower so many graces to one woman, but they are all in Madame Angelique. Moreover, she has the subtlest of sex strategy, for in greeting me she made a stumble with her lace petticoat so that I might catch the daintiness of her foot and ankle. She also has the swiftest, as well as the softest of glances, and I felt it travel from my brogues to my head, approving the journey, I fancied. "I have been particular about Madame Angelique because she is a woman in a thousand, this frail beauty of New France, its Madame de Pompadour in brilliance, however the comparison may hold in virtue, and because, if I prosper at all in the friendship, I hope to hear from her the inner news of events here which, by its usefulness to General Wolfe, is to lead me far in my home desires. When I left Scotland I had a sore heart, for truly it fills that heart, but you will gather that I have found a fresh land which also has its milk and honey. "How much of them shall I sip? That's the gamble, and time will tell, but it is a great gamble in which I am enlisted, and, by my faith, I like a gamble. It stirs the blood in me, makes it run as it ran when I made love to my first sweetheart, and a strapping lass she was, though, alas! I have almost forgotten her very existence. Poor Carrie! I wonder, I wonder, but hi, ho! what use to ask of the flowers of yesterday, where are they? "Only, my dear Captain Gordon, I wish I could have taken you with me last evening to that romp at the Chateau Bigot. Yes, I remember, your tastes are different from my own--less elastic, shall we say?--and you might not have come. Well, set love and gambling and sport, all done with abandon, in a choice, beflowered fold of this New France country and you may realize what you have missed and I have seen. "Revelry! That is not the word for the night, and it took all the seriousness in me to recall that I had other interests among the revellers besides theirs. My elegance in our Highland dress, for to be sure I wore it, cost me many a temptation, and if Madame Angelique, late in the evening, had gone a minute longer with her whimsical measurings of my leg where it garters, why, sir, I should have made a fool of myself. But she merely said she wanted to test whether I was not modelled to perfection for dancing the Highland dances, and wouldn't I oblige her and the company?