She understood me.  “Yes, my cousin has talked to me.  Yet I think that I am not echoing him, monsieur.  If I have hardened in the last few days, it is because I have come to see the inevitableness of what I am saying now.  I have grasped the terrible significance of what is happening.  May I ask you some questions?”

“Yes, Mary.”

“Oh, you must not——­ The Seneca messengers, you will let them go back and rejoin their camp?”

“We can do nothing else.”

“And you will follow them, and attack them at La Baye?”

“So we plan.”

“But the Senecas trust you.”

“Not for a moment.  They think we fear their power over the Hurons,—­as we do,—­so they are reckless.  They are undoubtedly carrying peace belts from our Hurons to the Iroquois and the English.  We must intercept them.”

She tried to ward my words, and all that they stood for, away.  “You see!  You see!” she cried, “we must part.  We must part while we can.  Monsieur, say no more.  I beg you, monsieur.”  And she dropped in a chair by the table and laid her head in her arms.

I could say nothing.  I stood helpless and dizzy.  I had asked her to forget her country.  Yet not once had she asked me to forget mine.  If I gave up my plans I could go to her now and draw her to my breast.  I gripped the table, and I did not see clearly.  To save her life I had jeopardized my plans; to follow her here I had jeopardized them again.  But now that I knew her to be safe——­ No, I could not turn back; I must walk the path I had laid for myself.

“What will you do with yourself, with your life?” I asked with stiff lips.

She did not raise her head.  “We are both children of opportunity.  What is left either of us but ambition, monsieur?”

“You will help your cousin in his plans?”

“If he will work for the state.”

“But you will not marry him?”

“Monsieur, I bear your name!  That—­that troubles me sorely.  To bear your name yet work against France!  Yet what can I do?”

I touched her hair.  “Carry my name and do what you will.  I shall understand.  As to what the world thinks,—­we are past caring for that, madame.”

And then for a time we sat silent.  I thought, with stupid iteration, of how like a jest this had sounded when the woman said it to me in the forest:  a matter for coquetry, a furnishing of foils for the game.  If I had realized then——­ But no, what could I have done?

One thing my thought cried incessantly,—­women were not made for patriotism.  Yet even as accompaniment to the thought, a long line of women who had given up life and family for country passed before my memory.  Could I say that this woman beside me had not equal spirit?

It seemed long that we sat there, though I think that it was not.  I laid my hand on hers, and she turned her palm that she might clasp my fingers.