“The devil himself is no match at all for you!”

“But I married him before I knew that,” returned Archange; and Louizon grinned in his wrath.

“I don’t like such women.”

“Oh yes, you do.  Men always like women whom they cannot chain.”

“I have never tried to chain you.”  Her husband approached, shaking his finger at her.  “There is not another woman in the settlement who has her way as you have.  And see how you treat me!”

“How do I treat you?” inquired Archange, sitting down and resigning herself to statistics.

“Ste. Marie!  St. Joseph!” shouted the Frenchman.  “How does she treat me!  And every man in the seigniory dangling at her apron string!”

“You are mistaken.  There is the young seignior; and there is the new English commandant, who must be now within the seigniory, for they expect him at the post to-morrow morning.  It is all the same:  if I look at a man you are furious, and if I refuse to look at him you are more furious still.”

Louizon felt that inward breaking up which proved to him that he could not stand before the tongue of this woman.  Groping for expression, he declared,—­

“If thou wert sickly or blind, I would be just as good to thee as when thou wert a bride.  I am not the kind that changes if a woman loses her fine looks.”

“No doubt you would like to see me with the smallpox,” suggested Archange.  “But it is never best to try a man too far.”

“You try me too far,—­let me tell you that.  But you shall try me no further.”

The Indian appeared distinctly on his softer French features, as one picture may be stamped over another.

“Smoke a pipe, Louizon,” urged the thorn in his flesh.  “You are always so much more agreeable when your mouth is stopped.”

But he left the room without looking at her again.  Archange remarked to herself that he would be better natured when his mother had given him his supper; and she yawned, smiling at the maladroit creatures whom she made her sport.  Her husband was the best young man in the settlement.  She was entirely satisfied with him, and grateful to him for taking the orphan niece of a poor post commandant, without prospects since the conquest, and giving her sumptuous quarters and comparative wealth; but she could not forbear amusing herself with his masculine weaknesses.

Archange was by no means a slave in the frontier household.  She did not spin, or draw water, or tend the oven.  Her mother-in-law, Madame Cadotte, had a hold on perennially destitute Chippewa women who could be made to work for longer or shorter periods in a Frenchman’s kitchen or loom-house instead of with savage implements.  Archange’s bed had ruffled curtains, and her pretty dresses, carefully folded, filled a large chest.

She returned to the high window sill, and watched the purple distances growing black.  She could smell the tobacco the men were smoking in the open hall, and hear their voices.  Archange knew what her mother-in-law was giving the young seignior and Louizon for their supper.  She could fancy the officers laying down their pipes to draw to the board, also, for the Cadottes kept open house all the year round.