“Mademoiselle de Granville, my commandant’s sister, is at St. Bernard; yes,” replied Jacques, arrested and stupefied by such inquiries. “Look you here, my good friend,” exclaimed Jouaneaux. “I speak for the nuns of St. Joseph of the Hôtel-Dieu, where your master put his sister for protection before he set out. Was not her fire built to suit her? We are poor, but our hospitality is free, and we love not to have it flung back in our faces. Still, I say nothing of mademoiselle. She hath her seigniory to look after, and she was not a novice.” “My master left my lady at the governor’s house,” asserted Jacques. “But,” continued Jouaneaux, “this I will say: ill did she requite us in that she carried off the novice Massawippa, whose father, the Huron chief, had put her in the Hôtel-Dieu to take vows.” “I will go to the governor,” threatened Jacques, feeling himself baited. “And what will it profit thee to go to the governor? The governor is a just man, and he hath the good of the Hôtel-Dieu at heart.” “I know nothing about your Hôtel-Dieu,” said Jacques, having forebodings at his heart. “But where is our novice?” persisted Jouaneaux, following him. “I know nothing about your novice.” At the governor’s house, by scant questions on his part and much speech on Jouaneaux’s, he learned that Dollard was yet unheard from, that Claire had been left at the hospital, and for some unspoken reason, which Jacques silently accepted as good since it was the commandant’s reason, she had been received as the commandant’s sister; and finally that she had disappeared with a young novice, the daughter of Annahotaha, soon after the expedition left, and no one in Montreal knew anything else about her. Distressed to muteness by such tidings, Jacques went back to his boat, still followed by Jouaneaux, and pushed off up the river with the malediction of St. Joseph invoked upon him. As his Huron rowed back along Lake St. Louis they saw a canoe drifting, and cautiously approaching it they found that it held a wounded brave in the war-dress of the Hurons. He lay panting in his little craft, feverish and helpless, and they towed him to the island and carried him up into the seigniory kitchen. The May sun shone and bees buzzed past the windows; all the landscape and the pleasant world seemed to contradict the existence of such a blot on nature as a blood-streaked man. The family gathered fearfully about La Mouche as he lay upon a bear-skin brought down from the saloon for him by Joan. Jacques gave him brandy and Louise bathed his wounds. They used such surgery as they knew, and La Mouche told them all the story of the Long Saut except his desertion. None of five deserters who escaped from the Iroquois, and from the tortures to which the Iroquois put all the deserters after burning the fort, could tell the truth about their own action until long after.