Clementine's father beckoned to the boy, and put her in his care.

"Take her home to the women," Saint-Denis whispered. "She is not used
to war and such sight as these. And bid some of the older ones stay
with her."

Anselm and Clementine went out, their hands just touching as he led
her in wide avoidance of the figure on the floor. Sainte-Helene
did not know the boy and girl left him, for starlight, for silence
together, treading the silvered earth in one cadenced step, as
he awaited that moment when the solitary spirit finds its utmost
loneliness.

Gaspard also went out. When the governor sat in his armchair, and his
seignior lay on the bed, and Le Moyne de Sainte-Helene was stretched
that way on the floor, it could hardly be decent for an old habitant
to stand by, even cap in hand. Yet he could scarcely take his eyes
from the familiar face as it changed in phosphorescent light.
The features lifted themselves with firm nobility, expressing an
archangel's beauty. Sainte-Helene's lips parted, and above the patter
of the reciting Recollet the watchers were startled by one note like
the sigh of a wind-harp.

The Montreal militia, the Lorette Hurons, and Beauport men were still
thronging about, overflowing laterally upon the other farms. They
demanded word of the young seignior, hushing their voices. Some of
them had gone into Gaspard's milk cave and handed out stale milk for
their own and their neighbors' refreshment. A group were sitting on
the crisp ground, with a lantern in their midst, playing some game;
their heads and shoulders moving with an alacrity objectless to
observers, so closely was the light hemmed in.

Gaspard reached his gateway with the certainty of custom. He looked
off at both ends of the world. The starlit stretch of road was almost
as deserted as when Quebec shut in the inhabitants of Beauport. From
the direction of Montmorenci he saw a gray thing come loping down,
showing eyes and tongue of red fire. He screamed an old man's scream,
pointing to it, and the cry of "Loup-garou!" brought all Beauport men
to their feet. The flints clicked. It was a time of alarms. Two shots
were fired together, and an under officer sprung across the fence of a
neighboring farm to take command of the threatened action.

The camp of sturdy New Englanders on the St. Charles was hid by a
swell in the land. At the outcry, those Frenchmen around the lantern
parted company, some recoiling backwards, and others scrambli