Dully, apathetically, Law lived on his life here at Montreal for yet a time, at the edge of that wilderness which had proved all else but Eden.  Near to him, though in these guarded times guest by necessity of the good sisters of the Convent, dwelt Mary Connynge.  And as for these two, it might be said that each but bided the time.  To her Law might as well have been one of the corded Sulpician priests; and she to him, for all he liked, one of the nuns of the Convent garden.  What did it all mean; where was it all to end? he asked himself a thousand times; and a thousand times his mind failed him of any answer.  He waited, watching the great encampment disappear, first slowly, then swiftly and suddenly, so that in a night the last of the lodges had gone and the last canoe had left the shore.  There remained only the hurrying flood of the St. Lawrence, coming from the West.

The autumn came on.  Early in November the ships would leave for France.  Yet before the beginning of November there came swiftly and sharply the settlement of the questions which racked Law’s mind.  One morning Mary Connynge was missing from the Convent, nor could any of the sisters, nor the mother superior, explain how or when she had departed!

Yet, had there been close observers, there might have been seen a boat dropping down the river on the early morning of that day.  And at Quebec there was later reported in the books of the intendant the shipping, upon the good bark Dauphine, of Lieutenant Raoul de Ligny, sometime officer of the regiment Carignan, formerly stationed in New France; with him a lady recently from Montreal, known very well to Lieutenant de Ligny and his family; and to be in his care en voyage to France; the name of said lady illegible upon the records, the spelling apparently not having suited the clerk who wrote it, and then forgot it in the press of other things.

Certain of the governor’s household, as well as two or three habitants from the lower town, witnessed the arrival of this lady, who came down from Montreal.  They saw her take boat for the bark Dauphine, one of the last ships to go down the river that fall.  Yes, it was easily to be established.  Dark, with singular, brown eyes, petite, yet not over small, of good figure—­assuredly so much could be said; for obviously the king, kindly as he might feel toward the colony of New France, could not send out, among the young women supplied to the colonists as wives, very many such demoiselles as this; otherwise assuredly all France would have followed the king’s ships to the St. Lawrence.

John Law, a grave and saddened man, yet one now no longer lacking in decision, stood alone one day at the parapet of the great rock of Quebec, gazing down the broad expanse of the stream below.  He was alone except for a little child, a child too young to know her mother, had death or disaster at that time removed the mother.  Law took the little one up in his arms and gazed hard upon the upturned face.