He looked at me a moment, and I stood silent for his initiative.  I remembered that I was dressed roughly, was torn and rumpled by my contest with the forest, and that I must appear an out-at-elbows coureur de bois.  He would not know me for the man he was seeking.  I waited for him to ask my name, and selected one to give him that was my own and yet was not M. de Montlivet.  Since names cannot be sold nor squandered, my father had bequeathed me a plethora of them.

But I credited the Englishman with too little acuteness.  He stepped forward.  “This is Monsieur de Montlivet?”

I could do no less than bow, but I kept my hand by my side.  “And you, monsieur?”

He smiled as at one indulging a childish skirmish of wits; but controlled as his face was, I could see the relief that overspread it at my admission.  “My name is Starling.  I have a packet for you, monsieur,” and he handed me Cadillac’s letter.

I hated the farce of the whole affair, and when I ran my eye over Cadillac’s message, which I could forecast word for word, I felt like a play-acting fool.  But I read it and put it in my pocket.

“You have had a long trip, Lord Starling,” I said, with some show of courtesy.  “It is new to see a man of your nation in this land!”

He waved me and my words into limbo.

“Where is the Englishman,—­the prisoner?”

A folded blanket lay beside the canoe, and I shook it out and spread it on the dew-drenched grass.  “Will you sit, Lord Starling?  Forgive me if I smoke.  It is unusual grace to meet a man of my own station, and I would enjoy it in my own way.  Will you do the same?  I see you have your pipe.”

He swung his great arm like a war club.  “Where is the prisoner?”

I sat on the red blanket and filled my pipe.  “I know of no prisoner.”

I thought he would have broken into oaths, but instead he shrugged his shoulders.  He walked to the other side of the blanket, and I saw that he limped painfully.  Then he sat down opposite me, his great turtle neck standing up between his humping shoulders.  With all his size and ugliness he was curiously well finished,—­a personality.  He was a man to sway men and women.  I felt it as I felt his likeness to his cousin, a likeness that I could not put my finger on but that I knew was there.  Small wonder that she dreaded him.  He was a replica in heavy lines of the sterner traits in her own nature.  He had something of her curiously winning quality, too.  Did she feel that?  She had promised to marry him.  I lit my pipe and smoked, and waited for him to declare himself.

He did it with his glance hard on me.  “You are playing for time.  Is that worthy your very evident intelligence, monsieur, since you can protract the game only the matter of a few hours at most?  I have Cadillac’s warrant for the prisoner.”

I smoked.  I felt no haste for speech.  What I had to say would make a brutal, tearing wound, and I hugged my sense of power and gloated over it like an Iroquois.  A woman was between us, and I knew no mercy.