The most successful wooers among these two or three hundred wife-seekers, however, were soldiers holding grants under their former officers. They pushed ahead of the slow habitant, and held their rights above the rights of any bush-ranger. Their minds were made up at a glance, and their proposals followed with military directness. So prompt and brief were their measures that couples were formed in a line for a march to the altar. Thirty at a time were paired and mustered upon the world by notary and priest. The notary had his small table, his ink-horn and quills, his books, papers, and assistant scrivener, in an angle of the lower hall. To find the priest it was necessary to open a door into a temporary chapel created in one of those closet-like offshoots which people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries dignified by the name of rooms. Here fifteen pairs at a time were packed, their breath making a perceptible cloud in the chill, stone-inclosed air as the long ceremony proceeded. Madame Bourdon rustled from upper to lower hall, repeating instructions to her charges. They were not forced to accept any offer which did not please them. They might question a suitor. And in some cases their questioning seemed exhaustive; for though a sacred propriety radiated throughout the bazar from nun and matron, here and there a young man sat on a bench beside a damsel, holding her hand and pressing it and his suit. The sun penetrated dust and cobweb on narrow high windows, finding through one a stone fire-place and wasting the light of several logs which lay piled in stages of roseate coals and sap-sobbing wood-rind. Madame Bourdon encountered Claire with surprise; but as she followed Mother Mary, it was evident that the abbess sanctioned her presence, so nothing was to be said on the subject. In all that buzz and trampling the abbess could not hear her demoiselle’s silken step, and she was herself a woman who never turned gazing about, but kept her modest eyes cast down as she advanced. The instant that Claire entered this lower hall she recoiled, feeling degraded in the results of her disobedience. She shaded her face. But the pride and stubbornness of her blood held her to her ground, though from mouth to mouth flew a whispered sentence, and she heard it, comprehending how current tattle was misrepresenting her in New France. “The king’s demoiselle! V’là! See you? There she goes to choose her husband--the king’s demoiselle!” IV. THE HUSBAND. CHÂTEAU of St. Louis though the government building of Canada was called, it had none of the substantial strength of Jesuit and Ursuline possessions; but was a low, wooden structure, roofed with shingles, and formed one side of the fort. Galleries, or pillared porches, with which Latin stock love to surround themselves in any climate, were built at the front, whence the governor could look down many sheer feet at the cabins of Lower Town.