“The largest of the Pottawatamie Islands,” I explained.  “I have had maps.  Pray God we may find what we seek.”

The canoes bumped and slid upward on the sand, and I left the men on guard, and taking the woman’s hand led her toward the lights.  A rabble of dogs trooped upon us and gave tongue, and black shapes, arrow-laden, clustered out of the wigwams.

“Peca,” I cried, in greeting, and again, “Where is your chief?  Where is Onanguisse?”

A French voice answered, “Who calls?” The mat that hung before the entrance of the nearest lodge was pulled aside, and smoke and red light flared out of the opening.  I saw the black robe of a priest!

“Father Nouvel, Father Nouvel!” I cried like a schoolboy.  “You are indeed here!”

The priest stooped to pass through the skin-draped opening, and came peering into the starlight.

“Who calls Father Nouvel?” he demanded in a mellow voice, rich in intonations.  “What, an Indian woman, monsieur!  Who are you?  What means this?”

I led the woman forward.  “Father Nouvel, this is Mademoiselle Starling, an Englishwoman who was captured by the Indians.  We have traveled fast and far to find you.  Can you marry us at once?”

It was badly done.  I had jumbled my speech without wit or address, like a peasant dragging his milkmaid before the village cure.  The woman may have felt my clumsiness.  She dropped my hand, and curtsied deeply to the father, and he, staring, checked the hand that he had raised to extend to her, and bowed deeply in turn.  It was a meeting, not of priest and refugee, but of a man and woman who had known the world.  Father Nouvel was very old and his skin was wrinkled ivory, but at this moment he wore his cassock as if it were a doublet slashed with gold.  His command was an entreaty.

“Come nearer, daughter.  I wish to see your face.”

She followed him close to the flaring light that poured from the wigwam, and he looked at her as unsparingly as if she were a portrait of paint and oil.

“I have never seen you,” he decided.  “Yet the name Starling,—­it is unusual, and it brings troubling memories to my mind.”

The woman deliberated a moment.  She was indeed a woman with wit that did not need mine, and I felt it to be so, and I stood at one side, and thought out my own conclusions.  She looked up.  “At Meudon?” she suggested to the priest.

He smote his palms together.  “I am old,” he mourned.  “Else I could never have forgotten.  At Meudon, of course.  It was at a meeting of Jacobites.  An exile named Starling—­he was a commanding man, my daughter—­was their leader.  How did you know?”

She stood there in her Indian dress of skins with a forest around her and talked of courts.

“I remembered that you were in Paris three years ago,” she explained, “and that our king—­yes, our king, Father Nouvel, although a king in exile—­talked sometimes with you.  There was often one of your order at the meetings at Meudon.”