And with a last flash of his blue coat Alfred de Courtenay was gone.
McElroy ran his fingers helplessly through his tousled light hair and
faced his friend.
"Now, by all the Saints!" he said with a strange mixture of regret and
relief, "what an unhapy ending!"
But at that moment he was thinking of the wondrous beauty of the man
and of the picture of Maren Le Moyne's brown arms spread wide apart
with the laughing child between, and again that little feeling of
vexation crept into his wholesome heart.
Without in the soft night the late guest was striding, a graceful
figure, hurriedly down toward the gate he had entered so short a time
ago, and his slender hand played restlessly at his hip. His heart was
seething with swift-roused emotions. So had its quick stirrings brought
him into many a scrape in his eventful life. That word of his host,
"which speaks almost of foes," sang in his ears.
And yet it had been given only in the spirit of enlightenment.
Behind, John Ivrey gathered up the men idling about the fire and
talking with the men of the post, where question and answer had begun
to stir uneasiness.
In a ragged, uneven line they strung out, fading into the darkness, and
presently from down the river some forty rods there rose up the columns
of their fires.
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